Cloth modelling headaches
Hi, I am a junior 3d artist, working in games. A lot of the work I do now revolves around making characters and therefore, clothing too.
Some questions I just can't seem to find an answer to, need someone to point me in the right direction.
1. Should my model be a single object - I was told it's easier for the rigger this way, but I always get baking artifacts along the lines where different clothes are connected, so that could be avoided if the model was split. Also the model just looks fake when it's 1 piece. (sreenshot1)
2. What's the best way to deal with thickness? My approach makes it so that it's really hard to do and control properly and also seemingly impossible to bake (screenshot1)
3. I just can't seem to get the high poly folds baked on to the lowpoly so that they look correct, they always seems squished and square-like. (screenshot1).
4. Why do some pros cut up their model into triangles along the folds? Does that help with the form, is that practical? In general I try to keep characters with symmetrical topology so that rigging would be easier and all quads just because I don't know when I can use triangles. Would adding triangles like that break the symmetry functionality in rigging? Attaching an image of Ilya Gagarin's piece, he tends to make a lot of triangles along the folds, love his work btw. (screenshot2)
5. How important is it to keep the polygons as square as possible? There's always some variation and unless I start some extra loops midway the polygons at the bottom of a dress get twice the width of the top ones - so not that good for animation right?
6. Hard edges and loops - when and where to add them. Is hard edges the same as a "creased" edge in zbrush, and is that ever usable in making clothing?
My workflow atm is as follows:
1. Make the base mesh of the body for the character in zbrush
2. Make the clothing base in marvelous designer on top of the body, export as thin for multiple objects.
3. Retopo and add thickness along the visible edges in maya
4. Reproject the high poly details + add extra details in zbrush
5. Bake in substance painter (is marmoset a better baker?) get artifacts along the edges and paint them out...\ end result looks kinda messy around the edges.
Any tips on how I could improve the workflow would also be appreciated.
Some questions I just can't seem to find an answer to, need someone to point me in the right direction.
1. Should my model be a single object - I was told it's easier for the rigger this way, but I always get baking artifacts along the lines where different clothes are connected, so that could be avoided if the model was split. Also the model just looks fake when it's 1 piece. (sreenshot1)
2. What's the best way to deal with thickness? My approach makes it so that it's really hard to do and control properly and also seemingly impossible to bake (screenshot1)
3. I just can't seem to get the high poly folds baked on to the lowpoly so that they look correct, they always seems squished and square-like. (screenshot1).
4. Why do some pros cut up their model into triangles along the folds? Does that help with the form, is that practical? In general I try to keep characters with symmetrical topology so that rigging would be easier and all quads just because I don't know when I can use triangles. Would adding triangles like that break the symmetry functionality in rigging? Attaching an image of Ilya Gagarin's piece, he tends to make a lot of triangles along the folds, love his work btw. (screenshot2)
5. How important is it to keep the polygons as square as possible? There's always some variation and unless I start some extra loops midway the polygons at the bottom of a dress get twice the width of the top ones - so not that good for animation right?
6. Hard edges and loops - when and where to add them. Is hard edges the same as a "creased" edge in zbrush, and is that ever usable in making clothing?
My workflow atm is as follows:
1. Make the base mesh of the body for the character in zbrush
2. Make the clothing base in marvelous designer on top of the body, export as thin for multiple objects.
3. Retopo and add thickness along the visible edges in maya
4. Reproject the high poly details + add extra details in zbrush
5. Bake in substance painter (is marmoset a better baker?) get artifacts along the edges and paint them out...\ end result looks kinda messy around the edges.
Any tips on how I could improve the workflow would also be appreciated.
Replies
Kanni3d - OK so I tried baking in Marmoset, it's really fast and powerful, but painting skew and offset on the cage does not solve this particular problem. However this functionality alone makes it worth using, and as for the quality of the maps they seem on-par with the ones baked from Substance, so I will try to make Marmoset my main baker from now on and see how it goes.
Alex Javor - I checked him out and it seems he has a plethora tutorials for those who support him on patreon. stuff looks solid and I'll dive right into it next week - thank you