Hi, I am attempting to model some clothes for a character imported from makehuman. I tried the method recommended elsewhere on this site involving duplicating the makehuman model, deleting the parts like the head not needed for the clothes, decimating (or poly reduce scripting) the mesh then smoothing it in sculpt mode. I attempted it in blender 2.50 alpha0 (apart from the poly reduce script, which isnt in 2.5 yet so i used 2.49b). I was not keen on the topology that resulted. I at first tried retopo tools but then had another idea:
Model it in 2d from a reference photo of the clothing (at first I tried a t-shirt) lying flat, as though about to be folded. Then I duplicated the vertices and moved them away a little to give it depth before going round the outside edges where the seams will be and merging at centre. This gives a rough approximation of a t-shirt as seen here…
(the above has 2 subsurf levels and ambient occlusion, lit by an area lamp in blender 2.5)
However, this is far too narrow to put on my makehuman mesh. What I need to do is to stretch it out, but while keeping the lengths of all the edges the same, so as it gains in depth it gets narrower on the x axis, just like a real t-shirt. Does anyone have any advice on how to acheive this? Perhaps some sort of strange soft body set-up i haven’t thought of, or is there a modifier that will lock the surface area/edge lengths? Has anybody ever tried a similar method before?
For still or animation by the way? Similar techniques for animation could be used for still work.
First of all, taking what you have and using proportionate editing would not be that hard.
That is the way I am sure I did the example blend attached here. It started out as a flat mesh drawn in the front view. It was then extruded and shaped. After I had the basic simple shape, I subdivided it.
This was the blouse ( but subdivided quite a bit) that was used in this example:
Basically what you want for a clothing model - that you are using with the modifier in an animation - is something simple but highly subdivided. And you only want it to be a simple shape that is larger than the body mesh used for collision.
The actual shape of the cloth object should be made from the body it is resting on by way of collisions.
It is only a matter of determining what basic shape to start with.Then you simply let the shirt fall on the object before animation starts.
If this is for still work then running the cloth simulation for about 100-200 frames and then picking a frame to apply the modifier is one option to make a great shape for the cloth. Just make sure and keep copies of the object around at the various stages such as low poly, subdivided, applied etc. So you don’t lose what you have started with if you need a do over.
