Two-sided cloth menace

Assbeard

Hi.

I'm having a problem making cloth for a character, where both sides of the cloth must have it's own UVs. I also want to use alphatesting to make some tears at the edges of the cloth, so I can't model "thickness" since then you would be able to see into the model at the edges.

With that in mind, I simply copied parts of the cloth, flipped the normals, and built the interior by hand. This worked fine until after I had UV:ed everything and tried to weld the two mirrored sides together for final export, when the vertices at the center seam just refused to weld (or collapse) anywhere the cloth has an interior. The outside welded with the inside, but that's not really what I wanted. So I get a nasty lighting seam throughout.



Is there a better way to make two-sided cloth? Or anyway to get around the won't-weld problem? I am using 3dsmax and Edit Polygon.

Any tips would be appreciated.

rooster

what happens if you convert to edit mesh and weld them, then convert back? I'm pretty sure edit mesh lets you weld whatever you like

MoP

Rooster: Nah, Edit Poly just breaks them again.

You won't be able to weld those - anyway, doing so might cause smoothing errors. I'd just leave both sides of the cape unwelded ... yeah, vertex-heavy, but there's not much else you can do.

I guess you could just convert to Editable Mesh if you're certain the model is finished and ready for rigging. I'd just leave it as-is.

KDR_11k

You could move both sides of the cloth slightly apart so there are no manifold edges in your welded mesh.

Assbeard

Thanks guys.

Edit Mesh was able to weld and it looks allright now. I suppose with smoothing groups, the in-game vertex count would be the same as if I just left the inside-outside unwelded, so either way would work.

KDR: I didn't want to add "thickness" since I want to use alphatesting to put some holes and such in... the view angles would have to be pretty extreme to notice, but still.