Zbrush: Seamless Patterns On Clothes

PoliteAssasin

Hey guys,

I'm in the middle of developing a character right now and am at the stage where I begin detailing the basic suit in zbrush. I was curious as to how I would approach this after several failed attempts. The suit is a simple spandex type clothing which I would like a pattern to tile across the whole suit, seamlessly. An example of what I'm going for would be Miranda's suit from the game Mass Effect 2.








The way the hexagons flow seamlessly throughout her suit is the type of effect I want to go for. But I have no way to do it without overlapping or picking up my mouse which would result in unmatched borders. I know there has to be an easier way to do this. I'm sure it'd be like putting scales on a dragon or something. I tried doing this with the wrap function on a brush, but it would overlay and distort the shape, and stretch on the sides. I can't find any other topics about this, so this is my last resort. Hopefully you guys can help me out.

Thanks in advance,

-Polite

Ace-Angel

As Dustin said, either do it in the Texture area or use a specific package (Maya, 3DS Max).

Zbrush, unfortunately doesn't have the required tools to do such a thing easily enough. Mudbox 2012 apparently has a new projection wrapping method for doing this (didn't try it still) and 3DC had spline based texture mapping (which was available ages ago.)

PoliteAssasin

Thanks for the responses guys. So if I was do do it in textures, how would I get it to be seamless since my UV's aren't all in one piece? So I'm guessing that people who model dragons won't do the scales in Zbrush then? I'm going to be doing a creature next, which will employ the use of scales, and and wondering for future reference. I got ZBrush because I found it was better than MudBox in sculpting. I guess MudBox would be better in terms of texturing then?

-Polite

Ace-Angel

ZBrush vertex paints while Mudbox either uses Ptex or paints directly on texture sized maps, so yeah, you could say the latter is better (although you can still make good base/medium details in ZBrush, I suggest reading Scott Spencer's books about that).

As to how you would do it in 2D, well, it really depends on how your UV is layed out. Miranda (if you look closely, especially at her arse, yeah yeah, I know), you'll notice that she has several parts in on her suit that look as if they have seams but continue the Honycomb pattern.

You can essentially plan out your UV's before hand so that you can simply overlay much of the pattern, with only having to clean up minor parts later, also, she has many cut-out parts.

Of course, they could also simply have used small textures and tiled them through a material ontop of the larger one.

Another way to do it it set up projections (in the case of 3ds Max for me) I can setup Camera's and simply correct the seams and project back the final texture and clean it up.

If you could post up just a shot of your model and how you want the pattern to look, I'm sure more qualified people then me could help.

Bigjohn

Ace-Angel wrote: »

Another way to do it it set up projections (in the case of 3ds Max for me) I can setup Camera's and simply correct the seams and project back the final texture and clean it up.

What do you mean by that?

Sandro

Is it dragon you are going to model or some kind of clothing? Clothing has tons and tons of natural seams where you can break up your uvs and never even bother to do any sort of fixing work, projections and stuff.

As for dragon, I assume you want to sculpt scales - In that case just lay out your uvs, overlay black/white scale pattern and use resulting image to drive displacement in zbrush. Then it's straigthforward, you can use standard brush to enhance forms, fix problems and get desired look.

mortalhuman

You could do this in 5 seconds in mudbox with flatten to UVs and a custom stencil. :x

cryrid

It's doable in zbrush, same principle as chainmail. Give the mesh some nice UVs (even distribution and UVs seams aligned with the natural clothing seams are key), slap on a repeating pattern for a texture, and then zbrush can convert that to a mask. You can also UV morph if you want.

mortalhuman

Oh cool, I didn't know about uv morph.

Fingus

You could also use Projection Master or zApplink to overlay the tilable pattern and then do some cleanup to make the pattern tile around the character properly. As cyrid showed if you use Projection Master or zBrush (which uses PM) you can drop your projection directly to a texture map instead of vertex colour.

disanski

oo nice. I did not know you can do this in zbrush:) Thanks a lot cryrid

PoliteAssasin

Sorry for the late reply guys. I've been busy. Thanks for all of the responses. I can't afford to buy another program just for the texturing. As much as I would like to, mudbox is out of my reach for the moment.

As for Cyrid, can you please explain it a bit in regards to the UV layout? I have my UV's in different blocks. Such as one piece for the torso, one piece for the thigh, calf, foot, upper arm, wrist, and hands. I only UV'd one side since I cut the model in half. So should I keep the model together and UV, or proceed just as it is?

Another thing, I want it to flow correctly, rather than look painted on. So would this work with this method you're describing above?

Again, sorry for the late response. I appreciate all the help.

-Polite

cryrid

I have my UV's in different blocks. Such as one piece for the torso, one piece for the thigh, calf, foot, upper arm, wrist, and hands. I only UV'd one side since I cut the model in half. So should I keep the model together and UV, or proceed just as it is?

Another thing, I want it to flow correctly, rather than look painted on. So would this work with this method you're describing above?

If you keep the UV borders inline with the clothing's natural seams, a slight break in the pattern at these locations should be more natural and unnoticeable if it comes to that. Its 2am here at the moment so I can't exactly muster the mind power to think of how a honeycone pattern might try and wrap seamlessly from something like a torso to two legs, but the key thing here should be to just keep a consistent texture density so that all the cones are the same size.

As for symmetry, I think it's going to depend largely on how you've aligned the UVs around the mirroring points (so you'll want that to be perfectly vertical).

If the UVs are spaced correctly/evenly (I'm thinking something like pelt/unwrella/roadkill), the result should flow more like the final surface instead of the pattern looking like a flat overlay projected from a certain angle, if thats what you mean.

bugo

i would go by doing a 2nd uv texture and baking to the first one

PoliteAssasin

Thanks. I'm going to try it and see how it works. I appreciate the help.

-Polite

skdzines

bugo wrote: »

i would go by doing a 2nd uv texture and baking to the first one

Can you explain what you mean by this?

Thanks!