Advice with clothing texture seams

DustyShinigami

Hi

This is something I've been struggling to get right for a while now, so was wondering if anyone can offer advice on how they deal with this.

At the moment, I'm working on finishing off my high poly of Lara Croft. At the moment, I'm trying to work out what the best method is for getting a cotton pattern on the tank top. What I've been doing with things like belts/straps and other leather objects is unwrapping them in Maya and using the Surface/Noise generator in ZBrush, rather than using the default 3D projection. This has worked great so far, however with clothing, it's still an issue. 3D projection will just skew the pattern around the sides, but if I unwrap the mesh, where the seams are, the pattern always continues on a slant around the other side, like so:

This is the kind of cotton pattern I've trying to add with an alpha:

And the unwraps in Maya... I've made sure to add the cuts where seams would be on a real item of clothing - down the sides:

But I'm not sure what the best thing to do would be to get them more neater/straight on the other UV island. And of course, I shouldn't retotate the UV islands to try and get them a bit more aligned as then the shells wouldn't be straight (horizontal or vertical).

At the moment, this is a problem for the high poly, but this is always an issue I run into as well when texturing clothing for the low poly. ^_^;

Does anyone have any tips, advice, or workarounds on how to tackle this?

Thanks

gnoop

You just  need to unwrap   your UV in more rectangular   style.  Your mesh has enough tessellation ( edge loops) to deform   UV  properly and proportionally .       If you do it with   cloth simulation it usually always  that way since you start with sort of  rectangular pieces of cloth .   For low poly you  are free  then to re-bake it to any UV you want. 

DustyShinigami

gnoop said:

You just  need to unwrap   your UV in more rectangular   style.  Your mesh has enough tessellation ( edge loops) to deform   UV  properly and proportionally .       If you do it with   cloth simulation it usually always  that way since you start with sort of  rectangular pieces of cloth .   For low poly you  are free  then to re-bake it to any UV you want. 

So like in this example...?

Although this same model doesn't have that for the shirt and that's come out fine from what I can see. Apart from a few edges that are completely straight...

DustyShinigami

I'm also not sure how best to go about straightening shells like that. I mean, I'll use the Straighten UV tool, but I either get a yellow warning (in Maya) for some reason, the distortion is really bad doing it that I can't see how straightening it would help in the long run, or some curved edges just won't straighten properly. I just feel really unsure with the process. ^_^;

DustyShinigami

I mean... uhhhhhh

Alex_J

straighten the outer UV's as you did, and then invert select all the other UV's and use relax, you shouldnt need to manually adjust each edge like that.

DustyShinigami

Alex_J said:

straighten the outer UV's as you did, and then invert select all the other UV's and use relax, you shouldnt need to manually adjust each edge like that.

Okay, thanks for the advice. I'll give that a try.

DustyShinigami

Alex_J said:

straighten the outer UV's as you did, and then invert select all the other UV's and use relax, you shouldnt need to manually adjust each edge like that.

I just seem to keep getting those yellow warnings pop up for some reason. Even if I try deleting the History. :-\ Also, the way those edges go when straightening them look awful. :-/

Alex_J

you can click the warning to open it up and read the full description. but it doesn't appear to cause any issue so I think you can safely ignore it. yellow means a warning which isn't going to necessarily stop you from working or cause a serious issue. red indicates an error which usually means something you have to care about or points to why something is not working as expected. 

You can copy and paste the warning into google though and probably find out what it is talking about. Chatgpt is pretty good at reading that sort of thing to and converting to plain language.

Not sure what you mean about the edges looking awful? It's a gif not a video so I cannot easily skip ahead to the result but what I see looks like a normal straightened UV island. You should not be moving edges at all, just UV's, to be clear.

by the way a faster way to straighten them is to select the UV's and then use scale tool so you can just move them all at once and not have to fix the outliers.

DustyShinigami

Alex_J said:

you can click the warning to open it up and read the full description. but it doesn't appear to cause any issue so I think you can safely ignore it. yellow means a warning which isn't going to necessarily stop you from working or cause a serious issue. red indicates an error which usually means something you have to care about or points to why something is not working as expected. 

You can copy and paste the warning into google though and probably find out what it is talking about. Chatgpt is pretty good at reading that sort of thing to and converting to plain language.

Not sure what you mean about the edges looking awful? It's a gif not a video so I cannot easily skip ahead to the result but what I see looks like a normal straightened UV island. You should not be moving edges at all, just UV's, to be clear.

by the way a faster way to straighten them is to select the UV's and then use scale tool so you can just move them all at once and not have to fix the outliers.

This is the warning. At least on my laptop. I think the number was different on my PC:

// Warning: file: C:/Program Files/Autodesk/Maya2023/scripts/others/texShellArrayContains.mel line 56: Converting string "" to an int value of 1168.

Another one says 97 at the end.

This is how they're looking at the moment:

And then after relaxing the centre vertices:

The distortion map always makes me paranoid though. The checker maps usually show issues, so isn't that going to be a problem when texturing...? Or adding surface details in ZBrush?

Alex_J said:

by the way a faster way to straighten them is to select the UV's and then use scale tool so you can just move them all at once and not have to fix the outliers.

I'm not quite sure what you mean by this. Do you mean to select an edge and scale it down so it's straight?

Alex_J

Don't take my word for anything, for all you know I am chat gpt or a really smart baboon.

You should now make a temporary material and apply some tileable fabric material and see if the UV's are good or not. You can export it so that you can take a look in whatever renderer you'll use as well. Don't look at things from 2 millimeters away, just view it the same way it will be displayed whether its for use in a game, film, portfolio, whatever. This way you only address the problems which are going to matter for your situation and don't waste time perfecting things nobody would ever notice.

You can go ahead and test out those next steps too. Just make a new folder called TEMP or something like that and save your files there so you don't stink up your main work area while you perform these experiments. Try out some texturing and sculpting and baking and see how these UV's do. Just do a quick approximation of what you plan to do for the final thing. If it looks good, awesome! If there is too much distortion, then you can try out another way to unwrap and see if it solves the problem.

re: last question - yes you can just select a row of uv's and then use the scale tool to align them all straight. just another way to accomplish same thing but it's a bit faster sometimes and less fussy.

DustyShinigami

Alex_J said:

Don't take my word for anything, for all you know I am chat gpt or a really smart baboon.

You should now make a temporary material and apply some tileable fabric material and see if the UV's are good or not. You can export it so that you can take a look in whatever renderer you'll use as well. Don't look at things from 2 millimeters away, just view it the same way it will be displayed whether its for use in a game, film, portfolio, whatever. This way you only address the problems which are going to matter for your situation and don't waste time perfecting things nobody would ever notice.

re: last question - yes you can just select a row of uv's and then use the scale tool to align them all straight. just another way to accomplish same thing but it's a bit faster sometimes and less fussy.

Okay lol. Well, when the alpha texture is applied in ZBrush, the seam is looking a lot better now down the side. There is still some noticeable distortion present though. So I may tweak it a bit further.



And as to the last thing - Ahhh, yes, I know what you mean now. The Alignment tool.

DustyShinigami

Okay, thanks for the advice provided. I've done a bit of experimenting and decided to just straighten the sides and bottom, which is where the distortion happens the most. The rest is unfolded as normal and by unfolding the centre vertices. That's done a much better job at keeping it all clean and the distortion reduced.

DustyShinigami

Definitely looking WAY better now. And what bit of distortion is there is minuscule at best.

Neox

for things like that, it just makes sense, that you plan your meshes with sewing patterns in mind. but that being said, yes, cloth also stretches in reality, if not it would need to be more lose or be highly uncomfortable

gnoop

I use "live" unwrap  mode and "pinned" vertexes  in Blender.    P to pin,  alt P to un-pin . That way you  can edit not only a selected  loop  of UV  but rather  all others  like  stretching a pelt . It requires a bit of  miss and hit , pin , align ,unpin  etc    but works  better than just standard proportional editing .   I think Maya should have something like that  too.  It works like  "puppet wrap" in photoshop.

DustyShinigami

gnoop said:

I use "live" unwrap  mode and "pinned" vertexes  in Blender.    P to pin,  alt P to un-pin . That way you  can edit not only a selected  loop  of UV  but rather  all others  like  stretching a pelt . It requires a bit of  miss and hit , pin , align ,unpin  etc    but works  better than just standard proportional editing .   I think Maya should have something like that  too.  It works like  "puppet wrap" in photoshop.

I don't think I've had a tone of luck with pinning when unwrapping. I don't suppose you know if any video examples of this...?

pior

The somewhat hilarious plot twist is that a real tank top with brushed fabric would *not* have the fabric pattern lined up along the seams. The pattern meeting at an angle is necessary to give the garment its body fitting shape without stretching.


So : research the topic first, as not doing it could (did) lead you to make incorrect assumptions

And indeed, following a pattern design from a real garment would have solved the issue by itself. An automatic "pelt-style" unwrap gives something quite close to a real sewing pattern.

DustyShinigami

pior said:

The somewhat hilarious plot twist is that a real tank top with brushed fabric would *not* have the fabric pattern lined up along the seams. The pattern meeting at an angle is necessary to give the garment its body fitting shape without stretching.


So : research the topic first, as not doing it could (did) lead you to make incorrect assumptions And indeed, following a pattern design from a real garment would have solved the issue by itself.

This is true, however, even in that image, the pattern on both sides of the seam are still fairly straight. Not perfectly obviously. Whereas whenever I come to texture stuff like this, or use an alpha, one side is badly mis-aligned at an angle that it looks bad. Usually either just at the top or the bottom, like in the first image I shared.

The pattern on the back side is always slanted at an angle, which makes it do that. And the trouble with Surface/Noise generator in ZBrush, the Offset and Rotation options don't work for Alphas. I swear they did. But every time I've tried it, it only works for the NoisePlug. If I could mask the back part based on the unwraps/Polygroups, I could better control and re-align the pattern on the other side with a simple rotation.

pior

Oh I am sure that this Zbrush feature has limitations - but there's no reason to be limited by it, since you can do all these projections in a regular 3d app with full control anyways.

The extreme angle you are getting is because the unwrap is trying to stick to the surface variations of the model, whereas such an extremely tight tanktop would be made in stretched fabric, like a swimsuit ; and the actual sewing pattern of it would be less extreme than what the automatic pelt unwrap generates.
So overall it's bound to always feel "impossible" : the garment is either very stretched and made of swimsuit material, or it is not so stretched and more loosely worn, made of a patterned brushed cotton.

pior

Female stretchy swimsuit : 


Female tank top without much stretch : 

Michael Knubben

DustyShinigami said:

gnoop said:

I use "live" unwrap  mode and "pinned" vertexes  in Blender.    P to pin,  alt P to un-pin . That way you  can edit not only a selected  loop  of UV  but rather  all others  like  stretching a pelt . It requires a bit of  miss and hit , pin , align ,unpin  etc    but works  better than just standard proportional editing .   I think Maya should have something like that  too.  It works like  "puppet wrap" in photoshop.

I don't think I've had a tone of luck with pinning when unwrapping. I don't suppose you know if any video examples of this...?

You need to enable Live Unwrap for pins to have an effect. Take a look at the manual, it's quite a nice feature that I use often!

DustyShinigami

Michael Knubben said:

DustyShinigami said:

gnoop said:

I use "live" unwrap  mode and "pinned" vertexes  in Blender.    P to pin,  alt P to un-pin . That way you  can edit not only a selected  loop  of UV  but rather  all others  like  stretching a pelt . It requires a bit of  miss and hit , pin , align ,unpin  etc    but works  better than just standard proportional editing .   I think Maya should have something like that  too.  It works like  "puppet wrap" in photoshop.

I don't think I've had a tone of luck with pinning when unwrapping. I don't suppose you know if any video examples of this...?

You need to enable Live Unwrap for pins to have an effect. Take a look at the manual, it's quite a nice feature that I use often!

Is Live Unwrap a feature in all 3D modelling software or is that something in Max/Blender? I'm not sure I've seen it in Maya.

gnoop

I don't think I've had a tone of luck with pinning when unwrapping. I don't suppose you know if any video examples of this...?

I meant pins In Blender . I don't know if MAya  has something similar.  Last time I used Maya was 20 years ago.   It was just my guess  Maya  perhaps  has it.  At least   I think Roadkill  plugin for Maya  should do it  since it's based on Blender UV code.  

But I have no idea if it still works in Maya.   

Alex_J

maya has some sort of pinning in the uv toolkit but i never use it.  usually just straighten some UV's and then invert select (shift drag) and relax the others is fine for clothing IME.  i like to always try and use the same small set of core tools it seems to save mental bandwidth and make work go quicker. cause every little different tool has it's own quirks and hotkeys, but in the end all you are doing 90% of time is moving something on screen one place to another. just my preference of course

DustyShinigami

gnoop said:

I don't think I've had a tone of luck with pinning when unwrapping. I don't suppose you know if any video examples of this...?

I meant pins In Blender . I don't know if MAya  has something similar.  Last time I used Maya was 20 years ago.   It was just my guess  it  still perhaps  has.  At least   I think Roadkill  plugin for Maya  should do it  since it's based on Blender UV code.  

But I have no idea if it still works in Maya

Okay, thanks. I'll look into that plugin.

DustyShinigami

Alex_J said:

maya has some sort of pinning in the uv toolkit but i never use it.  usually just straighten some UV's and then invert select (shift drag) and relax the others is fine for clothing IME.  i like to always try and use the same small set of core tools it seems to save mental bandwidth and make work go quicker. cause every little different tool has it's own quirks and hotkeys, but in the end all you are doing 90% of time is moving something on screen one place to another. just my preference of course

Yeah, same. Maya's UV unwrapping just feels so optimised and problem free. 3ds Max has tested my patience with messing up other UV shells. I'm in Maya's UV Editor now, and though it has Pinning tools, there's certainly no Live Unwrap. I never usually both with them anyway, because as you say, the straighten tools do a pretty good job.

gnoop

If you want to try pins + live unwrap mode in Blender make sure  you marked seams  first  or did UV>seams from islands .   Pin a few points with P  , check in "live unwrap" in UV menu , then grab a pinned point and try to move it .   After that  it's pretty much self explaining .    It's not designed  to  exactly straighten islands  but rather  sort of proportional  editing,   bending islands  for better  conform with  each other  to save UV space etc.  Needs enough tessellation inside islands to work ok.       In a word same as puppet wrap in Photoshop.  I bet Adobe just borrowed the idea from Blender.

You still could use it for straighten thing . Select a loop  , pin it, then  right click and select straighten , repeat it for opposite  side loop , sometimes it's enough , sometimes you can use relax brush   after that .  

As I recall it worked same way in Road kill plugin .

Also you can make one quad  of an island perfectly square with align X and Y of its edges . Then hit L . Then do Unwrap>follow active quad  and it turns selected island into perfectly straight thing  but few parts  where stretching is too strong will be detached . Some add-ons could do it with a single click .

    

DustyShinigami

gnoop said:

If you want to try pins + live unwrap mode in Blender make sure  you marked seams  first  or did UV>seams from islands .   Pin a few points with P  , check in "live unwrap" in UV menu , then grab a pinned point and try to move it .   After that  it's pretty much self explaining .    It's not designed  to  exactly straighten islands  but rather  sort of proportional  editing,   bending islands  for better  conform with  each other  to save UV space etc.  Needs enough tessellation inside islands to work ok.       In a word same as puppet wrap in Photoshop.  I bet Adobe just borrowed the idea from Blender.

As I recall it worked same way in Road kill plugin

    

I need to re-learn Blender, but I'll certainly look at experimenting with it. And eventually try that plugin for Maya.