Approaching the texturing of clothes
polycounter lvl 5
Hi
I'm looking for some advice in order to improve my workflow for texturing clothing. I already ran into a problem with the way I unwrapped a shirt, which made a simple striped pattern a bit of an issue to get running consistently from the front to the back. I also came across this texture of pants used at Rockstar for RDR2:
I'm not quite sure if that was completely done in Photoshop or if something like this is typically done in Substance Designer. I've still yet to experiment and further learn SD in order to make various fabric details.
Does anyone know of any good courses (free or paid for) that covers the texturing process of clothing? Particularly with Substance Designer?
Thanks.
Replies
likely not substance designer, tho maybe some of the maerials used here have been created there. but usually this happens in substance painter nowadays.
uv wise the best you could and should do, is unwrap it pretty much like the sewing pattern would be in reality. this way any tiling patterns or lines will behave like a realy piece of cloth. also if you model/sculpt it with that in kind, uv seams will be hidden inside the actual sewing seamlines.
Yeah, I did unwrap my clothing based on the Marvelous Designer patterns, and where the seams would be. :) It's just for the top of the shirt, the reference mesh I looked at had the front and back sewed as one, which helped with the pattern to run consistently over it.
But not Substance Designer...? I was going to make use of it for my project, but ran out of time, so will have to play with it in my own time. But I figured all the fancy patterns and stitching were made there, such as these...
substance designer is great at making tiling patterns and procedural content it isnt really good at making unique textures. its possible tho, but highly unlikely that someone actually used designer for the final textures.
but as said it's possible thatt hey created procedural cloth base textures in designer, applied those in painter and then added grunde and dirt etc.
there are very well made and informative resources and tutorials made available for Substance Designer within the Adobe Creative Cloud desktop app launcher.
you can browse through the Substance Designer tutorials here which is also linked in the software Help menu, under Tutorials.
this tutorial is really well made and teaches you how to create a high quality pattern.
these video tutorials overview a process which use both Marvelous Designer and Substance software.
here is the official Adobe Substance 3D YouTube page which covers many aspects of their software from accredited sources.
RDR2 is a 2018 release that must have started life around 2012, give or take. Or perhaps even earlier, knowing how long these open world titles tend to take.
At any rate their workflow must have been set before the Substance craze. And those textures look like Photoshop in tandem with a 3D painter to me, nothing fancy. Note how in that tiling pattern you posted a closeup of there are color overlays that must have been applied after the padding, so the texture definitely has been 'fudged' after export from the painter. Also some visible traces of dodge & burn like brushes.
If I had to guess: Photoshop with either Mudbox or Quixel for the 3D painting part. Or perhaps even Zbrush polypaint if someone there was feeling a little masochistic. Zero use of Substance.
Thanks for the links. I’ll be sure to check them out. :)
Just checked Wikipedia and it looks like you’re right. Jesus… Development looks to have started after the first game around 2010/11. 😲 If my sources are right, this character was made by a freelancer. I think the artist who made Dutch van der Linde was too.
Info suggests Substance Designer was first released around the same time…? 2010…? Another source says 2014. But I understand Rockstar do use Photoshop a lot. I think the model I have is from the PS4 version, so the texture quality will be a lot lower. Would love to see the PC version up close… 😁
At any rate, it’s food for thought. :) But I’ll have a shot at SD as I need more practise with it. So I’ll try and make similar textures for my own model.
I still don't get why you focus on substance designer so much?
2014 is what I remember when Substance started to pop up. But I doubt that it would have been adopted this early: if you have a team with all ranges of experience levels that is perhaps not even located in the same place (assuming RDR2 was mainly done in Edinburgh and San Diego) then introducing new software can be pretty tough. Plus, I don't think Substance's use case was so clear in the beginning - for starters Painter wasn't really a thing yet and without that Designer would probably not have made it onto the radar of (typically non-technical) character artists. It's not like making fabric texture patterns was some black magic before.
At any rate, this isn't meant to discourage use of Substance. It's very likely what they are relying on too these days.
Um, because I want to learn how to use a piece of software properly…? To add something else to my toolbox as an artist…? To help make some pattern designs to use in my projects…? 😉
The way it works normally is you would make a tiling texture in substance designer and then use that in substance painter.
But a tiling fabric is super duper easy to make in substance designer. There is already several 'weave' patterns - mix those with some cloud patterns and you get fabric. Most fabric has a weave that's so small you can't see the individual fibers.