Minitutorial - Clothes for Makehuman

[Koba]

Hi

Well, I have been trying to make clothes for humanoid models quickly and easily for a while now. As I currently need to make decent clothes quickly and effectively for stills (no animation), I have come up with the following technique to create clothes for any pose. I will focus on clothing for the upper half of the body because that is the most tricky.


You will need sculpt mode to follow this mini tutorial.

Step 1 (as long as you like ):

• Create your character in Makehuman, pose it as you like and save it out to .obj format.

Step 2 (approx 30 seconds):

• Fire up Blender, load your mesh, duplicate it and move one copy to a seperate layer. Select that copy and add a "decimate" modifier. We need to eliminate all finer geometry in the chest area using this (belly button, chest structure etc). This is one huge decimation needed- a ratio of 0.03 is a good rule of thumb. Apply it.

Step 3 (approx 40 seconds):

• In edit mode, delete the hands, head and legs (remember this is for the top area only). Delete as *little* as possible (keep the neck and the arms).

Step 4 (approx 2 minutes):

• Apply a multires level. Open sculpt mode and use a "smooth" brush to get rid of any ugly structure in the chest area.

• Making sure that both the layer with the original mesh and the working mesh are visible, use the "inflate" brush to inflate the shirt till it is completely visible over the body. Sculpt to your satisfaction.

Step 5 (approx 1 minute):

• The ugly edges are probably worrying you by now so create a cube and position it till it obscures and encloses the frayed edges you wish to remove. Add a difference boolean modifer to the shirt, reference the cube and apply. Repeat for both sleeves and the bottom of the shirt.

• Now you are more of less done!

Step 6 (optional)

• At this point, you can add cuffs (by extruding the terminating edge loops of the sleeves), buttons and collars (similar method to the cuffs).

• For a shirt, you can delete the central line of vertices down the front (there should be one). You can now create the overlap to allow the shirt to be buttoned up. Technically, you could use a boolean operation again.

• If you use the Blender library script, you can have a nice reusable set of buttons and cuff links!

For trousers, you can use the above method on the legs. It is however, much easier as you do not need to perform decimation or add multires.

Hope that helped someone! If someone has a better way, please tell me!

Koba

EDIT> I've just realised that you may want to decimate for the trousers too...unless you want your character to have a wedgy

[Links]

very nice method, saved me alot of time and is very simple

[Koba]

very nice method, saved me alot of time and is very simple

Glad to be of help.

Here is an image I made using this method:



This is part of that big project I mentioned.
If you like it, consider it a teaser.

Koba

[PapaSmurf]

Excellent. thanks! Have you done any cloth simulations to see how it moves or flows, esp. with like robes and such?

[SHABA1]

Koba. I understood MOST of this all the way up to step 45 where you apply the difference modifier. How would that help straighten out the ragged edges on the cuffs and collars.?

[Koba]

Hi SHABA,

What happens is that you overlap the volume of the cube with the end of the sleeve/trouser leg. The boolean subtract modifier will subtract the volume of the cube from the clothes - as the ragged edges are inside the cube and the cube has nice straight edges itself, the ragged edges disappear.

One thing I forgot to mention is that this operation will close off the sleeve - just go into face select mode and delete the unwanted faces.

Hope that helps. Play with the boolean modifiers and you should see what I mean.

Koba

[SHABA1]

Thank Koba. I will check it out. I have not used the boolean modifiers much. Even in the older versions of blender. I just never had a need for them. As I said up to that point I somewhat understood the whole tutorial, even though I do not use the cvs version of blender that has the sculpt mode in it.

[Thangalin]

Hi,

I've expanded on Koba's instructions for all the Blender newbies out there (like me):

http://davidjarvis.ca/blender/

Hope it helps! Thanks, Koba!

[Koba]

Nice tutorial!
Goes through all the steps very nicely.
Personally, I would mention the use of Booleans as sometimes you don't find a nice edgeloop.

Glad to be of use/inspiration! ;-)

Koba

[filzr]

greetings, very cool tutorial but i was wondering if you could post a quick reply on how the inflate and smooth work?

when i try to inflate it doesnt seem to be consistant every time i do it.

after i smothed the slothing down inflate seemed to make it jagged again...any thoughts

[Thangalin]

Hi, filz.

Sorry, I only know what's written in the tutorial. ;-) When I get stuck on a problem, I usually start fresh and follow the instructions very carefully. More often than not it's something subtle that I missed the first time around. Good luck!

[Koba]

From my experience, you need to apply the smoothing brush *a lot* before getting a smooth inflate. Try smoothing more before inflating. Here are some more tips:

- Try using smooth from the mesh edit panel.

- Make sure you decimate to the same level each time. I suggest removing the head, hands and feet before decimation for more accurate results.

- Check you are using the same strength of inflate and smooth each time with the same brush size.

- If all fails, try using proportional editing.

Hope that helps.

Koba

[mandoragon]

Is it possible to see the image that you had at the top again please?

[Koba]

It took some digging, unzipping, rerendering and uploading but I've got the raw Blender output of that image back up for you, mandoragon! I'm loosing that webspace at the end of the year so it will vanish once again.

Hope you enjoy!

Koba

[forthfriend2]

THANKS!

I've been looking for a way to make clothes for a LONG time... Trust me. But when I found a tutorial that tells me how to make them, I was overjoyed. When I saw that it was for blender and on blenderartists, I almost cried. Then when I saw it was for makehuman, I almost died. This is exactly what I need... I'm using blender and makehuman...

Thanks so much!

Forthfriend2

[Avenger96]

wait, when does the shirt actually become a separate part from the person?

[ManOfSteel]

The shirt IS the body right from the start when the body was duplicated (in step 2). And then the useless parts were later removed from it.

[Ronson2k9]

A couple of things when importing Wavefront OBJ 'MakeHuman' (Objects/Meshes) to Blender. For the 2.48a (Wavefront) importer anyway. Undernieth 'Seperate Objects by OBJ' select 'OBJECT' / 'GROUP' / 'MATERIAL' When you import the mesh you will find that not only is it cleaner. You have your objects nicely selectable. The head and all it's objects are seperated... (Tongue/Teeth/Eyes/Eyebrows/Eyelashes). Not the lips unfortunately but still the main body is seperate from the Head. If you are using an ealier version I would suggest you select the mesh and then enter edit mode and 'Remove Doubles' as there will be a lot of them before you begin your work on the character.

I have a couple of questions though about the Tute?

Instead of copying and then removing why not just grab what you need from the mesh and copy that (Edit mode => Select Verts => Ctrl 'D') ('G' 'Z' - To move it above your character - See what you have) then exit edit mode and 'M' (Move - 0-9 Layer of your choice). When doing the inflate isn't it better to have more verts then less? I would think the lack of information blender has to work with would make it less detailed forcing you to put those back in again after?

I never thought of using Inflate before. I've always scaled the mesh up after finding the center. I can see the advantage in inflate though as it would push out from all verts not just along a path (x/y/z). While you perhaps don't want a skin tight shirt you do want it to 'fit' nicely. The example makes it look a bit like a winter sweater or sweatshirt. Which is good too.

I'm working on a dress uniform. When I started in modeling who would have thought you would need all these other skills. The engineering of a coat. It not only has to look like a coat but you have to 'Build' it so that the character can get in and out of it 'theoretically' of course. It also has to have the closure so that it can be fabricated that way. Oi Vay. It's enough to get the head spinning.

I've learned so much from coming here though. So much talent and so much to absorb. Skin - Hair - Eyes - Clothes... Just when you think there isn't something you can improve on you come here and someone has been right where you are and has done something magical. Coming here is almost as much fun as working on the model.

Thanks for the mini tute.. I'm off to see what if I can get her into her uniform...