Create Convincing Clothes - Video Tutorial (Updated part 2!)

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#1

My first blender video tutorial!

This tutorial goes through one method of modelling fairly convincing looking clothing. I go through the process of modelling a basic shirt sleeve, then show you how to run the cloth simulator to get some nice wrinkles in the elbow. Afterwards I make a quick little action to show off our new sleeve! This tutorial is not geared towards beginners, as I don’t do a lot of explaining about the modelling process, it is more of an advanced-beginner/intermediate level. You should be somewhat familiar with Blender and it’s settings/interface before you watch in order to get the most out of it.

WATCH HERE
PART 2 HERE

For the most part I use 2.53 Beta, but at one point I’m forced to switch back over to 2.4x in order to run a script that hasn’t been updated yet. It was one of the embedded scripts in 2.49b, so I’m sure it’ll be updated soon.

There are a number of things that I’d like to change for my next tutorial, but this was a bit of a learning process. First of all, the video seems to have a few anomalies (flashing at some points, blurry at others, etc.). Whether this comes from the recording process, the rendering process, or the uploading process, I’m not real sure, but I’m not that thrilled about it. There are some great HD quality video tutorials out there that are just crystal clear and when I look at the file size in vimeo for videos of similar length, they are quite a bit smaller than the file I ended up with. I’m not sure what codecs they are using, or screen capture software they are using, but it looks great! Any suggestions from seasoned video screen capture wizards out there?

Second thing, does my voice really sound like that in real life?!? Do I really say uhhh, ahhh, and umm, that many times normally?!? Wow…

Third thing, the audio is a little out of sync with the video. This could be the rendering process or also the fact that I recorded the video and then recorded the audio afterwards. I think next time I’ll try to do both at the same time. I thought that may slow down the tutorial.

Fourth, I didn’t like the fact that I had to switch back over to 2.49b during the tutorial. This caused some ugly cut scenes and made everything a little bit confusing. In the future I’ll try to stick with one version or the other. Speaking of cut scenes, how do you fade to black with the 2.53 vse? I had thought that adding a “color” sequence in an “alpha under” mode then key framing the opacity of the video would do this, but not so much. Do I actually need to add an alpha over/under effect and key frame the influence?

Finally, it’s long! I didn’t plan on making it that long and I was hoping to keep it under about 20 minutes. The modelling section turned out to be a little longer than necessary and I really could have done a time lapse for that to shorten the length. I’ll keep that in mind for next time.

All in all though I think it came out OK. Have a look at the blog post for a little more details and feel free to leave any comments about suggestions or recommendations for next time. Enjoy!

#2

Very in depth - nice job. I look forward to more tutorials from you!

I’m curious - for the cloth sim, do you know if it’s possible to parent separate low-poly objects to a high poly mesh, and use the low-poly just for cloth collisions?

I’m working on a robed figure, and most of their body would not be exposed, so I’m thinking of just setting up basic primitives for arms and such. But it would great at render time to just show the high poly model, for instance the arms and head.

#3

Hi Illusionist, thanks for the comment! We’ll see if I can come up with something else.

I think I know what you mean, let’s see if I can shed some light on it for you. You can most definitely use both a low-poly and a high-poly mesh with the cloth sim. The cloth collision simulator works only on objects that are on the same layer as the cloth mesh, so what I think you want to do is animate the low poly and high poly meshes to change layers. Both of these meshes can be setup as cloth collision objects.

In other words, when the high poly object will be visible in your animation, keyframe that to the visible layer with the cloth, then when the high poly object will be hidden under the cloth you can keyframe that to a hidden layer and keyframe the low poly object to the visible layer.

You also may mean that you have a low poly body and a high poly head, in which case your answer is fairly straight forward. You can setup both as cloth collision objects and just parent both objects to the armature that you are using. One armature has no problem controlling more than one object/mesh.

Hope this helps!

#4

Thanks for the reply! The second option makes total sense :slight_smile:

I’ll parent both meshes to the rig and just use the low poly mesh as the collision object. I’ll then turn it invisible during the final rendering.

#5

Added a second part to the clothing tutorial and updated the first post with a link as well:

PART 2

The second part of my clothing tutorial takes a look at modelling and animating a trench coat to have nice flowing wrists, tails, and collar. I go through the process of adding a pinning vertex group, adding the cloth simulator, trying it out with some wind, and finally animating a quick jump to see how it reacts.

This tutorial uses blender 2.53 throughout and the base mesh is from blender cookie (same as the first part). It is not particularly geared towards beginners and does not go through any of the modelling of the coat, so you should be able to do that by yourself before starting.

This is the first time that I’ve recorded the audio and video at the same time and I think it’s much nicer than doing them separately. I ran into some trouble with the audio not being synced up with the video when recording though, so I had to go back and straighten everything out. There is still about a second delay in the video, but hopefully it won’t be too distracting for you! I hope you all enjoy and please let me know what you think!

#6

Hey , looks really interesting your tutorials :slight_smile:
I hope you can do more about this with more animation :wink: