Im currently working on Clothing for my character model, which it is complete. However Im really confused as modeling is my only strong put. The base mesh is modeled but I am not sure where to begin giving it a texture that not only looks like fabric but makes it look like it is detailed as fabric.
I tried used images of the textures of fabrics and even photos taken of clothing to use. But those always end up scaled wrong and I have to scale the UV’s way way high up with sadly makes the normal map glitch out.
I was wondering of using Blender cloth simulator, but wondered if there was other ways to do it. I dont know what kind of material and texture set up to do or use. I really just want to make simple clothing, maybe im going overkill with trying to make it so the entire UV’s have a perfect fabric texture if you focus on them.
Really these things arent my strong suit. Im great at modeling, sculpting…and thats about it. Any advice?
Are you asking about creases in fabric, or the fabric texture it’s self?
This all depends on how high-poly you want your final mesh to be.
I would start by mesh modelling your basic clothing and then UV map (put seams where the clothing seams are, and press UV unwrap), then use a multires mod, and then sculpting creases. Sure, you COULD use a cloth sim, but it’s the difference between sculpting what you have in your head, and changing a series of paramaters, and seeing what happens, with a 60 second wait each time. When you’ve done that, depending on how high mesh you want your final mesh to be, you can bake the folds to a normal map and ao, or keep the high-res version, or decimate it a little, keeping the folds intact. Actually, decimating is not always so good if you plan to animate afterwards.
Well, that’s one approach to this. Start flicking through tutorials, and find a method you like.
Well, not sure why you mention cloth simulator and fabric texture together. These are mostly two separate things. If you want fine wrinkles in your cloth, it might be possible to do with cloth sim (fine mesh -> long sim time).
But I understand the question rather like you are asking about textures specifically, correct? So what kind of detail do you want to have? Just a high-res texture of the weave? Wrinkling? Seams and stitching? Color variations, dirt? Small holes, weave errors and lose strands? It depends on what is the best approach. As you said you failed to find a suitable image, there are these options left:
paint one yourself in an image manipulation program or take your own photos and prepare them there
create geometry in Blender for a (possibly tilable) section of fabric and bake it into an image
Share what you have, stripped down to minimum required. It’s hard to give advice (although I’m not the guy for this particular one) without knowing what you have to work with. Base mesh complete? For the character or the clothing? Sculpted or modeled? UV layout complete or for us to suggest if you need it textured? Fantasy or realism? What is fabric; cotton, satin, silk, knitted (ouch!) or denim? Might require different ways of shading. Do you have to deal with showing warp and weft?
If you want to go into cloth simulation, I suggest also watching a few marvelous designer tutorials just to get a feel for the shapes/patterns involved with different clothing. And keep those in mind when switching over to the blender clothing sim tutorials.
Thats kind of my issue, I thought the clothing simulator would do both.
The kind of texture I had was using a fabric texture, an image texture and then I made my own by making a wave texture and using a texture coordinate and scaling it. It was nice, very basic and primitive but there. I plugged it into the displamcent map/normal map.
Pretty much all your wrote, I made seams, wrinkles. Wanted it to look like just basic good 3d clothing.
Sadly that’s all I got done, things weren’t working so well, got an anxiety attack and stopped there because I spent hours working on the clothing and trying to texture it. I have my eyes on Poliigon’s fabric systems.
Thank you for the reply. I kind of work like this. I model the base mesh, then multires it and sculpt it, save the maps out. Ive been looking at tons of tutorials for years, they are all just for modeling it and not a system to set up nodes to make it look like real clothing.
I have my eyes on Poliigons material systems for clothing, Ive spent way to long trying to make this work.
