Modeling folds in leather couch cushions
polycounter lvl 12
I've tried searching but didn't come up with anything so forgive me if this has been covered before.
I'm modeling a sofa in 3ds Max2009 and am planning to model in the folds and such in a high poly model to bake down to a low. Here's a ref image:
I know I've seen tutorials somewhere about the best way to go about modeling the folds but google isn't being very helpful in my search. I'd rather keep it all in max at the moment instead of going into Zbrush, so if anyone has any advice, examples, etc, I'd appreciate it.
I'm modeling a sofa in 3ds Max2009 and am planning to model in the folds and such in a high poly model to bake down to a low. Here's a ref image:
I know I've seen tutorials somewhere about the best way to go about modeling the folds but google isn't being very helpful in my search. I'd rather keep it all in max at the moment instead of going into Zbrush, so if anyone has any advice, examples, etc, I'd appreciate it.
Replies
And having tried some years ago to give a high poly model extra detail with soft select, I can tell you right now this won't work either :P
Or are you just looking for a sort of "best way" to do it based on someone else's idea of modelling folds? You've got a good reference photo there, you know how to model in sub-d, why not just get working on it? You'd probably have a halfway decent result in the time that it'll take for someone (or yourself) to dig up any relevant tutorial. Seriously, try it!
Its cool dude. Yeah, your last sentence is my reason for asking.
Well, sub-d modelling something that has an abstract/kind-of-organic shape (such as a cushion) isn't exactly standard practice, I think. I mean the guy can maybe create mean tanks and spaceships, but a cushion is quite different imo.
/edit lol, MadArtist's portfolio is full of tanks and stuff like that, I saw it right after posting this reply XD
I am putting together a step-by-step image now to show how it was done, it's really not that hard and i'm sure you could do a better cushion if you spent a bit longer than i did
btw mop i reckon it'd look sicker with leather texture in the spec and diffuse than the normal ;D oh, unless it was comparitively high res i guess. I'm thinking game kind of res. just imo.
The wireframe view is horrible, but if it's for a normal-map generation highpoly, or even for a static cinematic rendered asset then it shouldn't matter - it's not going to animate or deform, all that matters is the end result. Basically I just looked at the reference pic and make quick cuts with the Cut tool to get the initial shapes of the folds, then just used Connect to hook up floating verts/edges and add a bit more detail.
Apologies for the big image, hopefully the image-resizing forum code works its magic!
As people have said, and Mop has proved, it can be done, but since sculpting it is easier you need to weigh up the various methods. I reckon that if you are proficient in Zbrush/mudbox you could do the entire unique sofa in the same time it took to model the few cushions.
Chuck in a few alpha maps created from sofa textures and you'll be laughing.
http://boards.polycount.net/showthread.php?t=50404
Oh SHI-- is that some divide by zero I see?
Actually that looks sort of fun, I might have to make a couch now