High P cloth modelling tips ?

motives

just started to model some high P clothes on this guy were doin in school and while it looks pretty good im slow and i still feel my techniques are lackin somethin. The good old "there must be a cooler way of doin this" :P

Anyways what i been doing sofar is stripmodeling out, starting at the seams of the cloth eg: neck, arms etc and then work my way from there eventually attaching everything to get a base mesh and then detail in the wrinkles etc. What takes the longest for me is to get the base mesh down right on the model. Its kinda tideous having to handplace every vert to match the curvature of the body.

Now i was just wondering what approach you guys have when it comes to cloth and stuff like it and if you might wanna share some tips n tricks to help speedin up my progress

StrangeFate

hmm i think i do it quite similar. In modo tho, i dont have to make the verts match the base mesh. I can put the base mesh in a background layer, do the cloth on the working layer, and have all the geometry i create snap to the geometry in the background layer (the base mesh). That way i can concentrate on placing the folds and the new verts will automatically rest on the base mesh.

Usually you don't want the cloth to rest on top of a nacked mesh so i tend to make a quick cage of what would be the cloth. If the cloth is close to the body i just copy that part of the base mesh and use the sculpt brush (its like the inflat brush in ZBRush) to push out the cloth cage from the body in some areas i want to.

When i have the cage i just use it in the bg layer to constrain/snap the final cloth layer.
Looks like this...


The green mesh is the rough cage that is used to place the proper version on top of. The green stripes in the final version are there to remind of where i want some main folds to go. Folds are usually just beveled from those stripes and welded down (or not) to create different looking folds.
At the end i go in and cut around to create the smaller folds.

http://www.strangefate.com/webby/madwires.jpg
http://www.strangefate.com/webby/madrenders3.jpg

There might be easier and faster ways to do them, but that's the workflow i came up with for the tools i use.

ironbearxl

When I saw this topic the first thing I thought of was that model you made from the what are yo working on thread

If you were using zbrush to render the cloth, you could also separate the green strip areas into groups so that the major overlapping areas don't get lost in the detailing.

EarthQuake

Oh wicked awesome SF nice to see that model done man

motives

yea SF that models kicks ass.. NJ

Anyways, thats a good tip to use a basemesh to snap on.. Need to check that out. Donno how well that will work in max.
What i (sofar) found most important while modelling cloth is to place your edgeloops where you want the folds.. At first i just build my basic quad mesh but it got really hard to place folds correctly that way.

StrangeFate

Yeah, the cloth has to flow the way you want the folds to be. If that's done it's easy to cut in new loops and add smaller or just more folds at any time.

I found it rather difficult to build the clothing AND keep all the loops flowing properly for all the folds at the same time, so using a base mesh to snap on seemed the best way to do it.