What do you guys think? I’ve used a Marvelous Designer model of a safety vest that I’ve bought, made some slight adjustments. Then I’ve exported it, imported it into Blender,prepared the materials for Substance Painter to only get one texture set / material and made some little adjustments in the mesh. The texturing was done in Substance Painter, the rendering in Blender Cycles.
Would you think it’s realistic? What else could I do to imrpove it? I don’t know I thought it would be easy as a saftety vest has not so much folds and when it is new there is not much structure on the surface but to me it looks like a plastic toy :-/
Experiment now with textures. Typically, safety vests (other than the reflective strips) are made of mesh materials which have many tiny holes for ventilation. A procedural texture (for instance) should be able to mimic that effect pretty easily.
These “mesh materials” are also noticeably less specular. They want to be “orange,” but at night they only want the reflective strips to stand out. Most commonly, they seem to be woven from nylon.
There’s some texturing part that causes the plastic look you’re seeing. But I guess it has less to do with texturing and more to do with the basic shape of the vest.
All of these edges are unnaturally straight, and that contributes the most to the plastic look, because that’s how thick plastic sheets look when they’re bent. That’s why the most realistic part of the whole vest is the pockets, because they crumple as they should.
You can try to sculpt it and incorporate some crumpling and folds. Or if you’re up to a challenge, try to resimulate the vest.
The geometry doesn’t really bother me, nor the look of the reflective strips. But the orange body of the vest does look like plastic. I think that “a little ‘texture and materials work’” on this specific area would make a great deal of difference, even if nothing else is changed.
@sundialsvc4@Sandtail thank you both for your feedback… I truly think you both bring valid issues in. I’ve already tried to add some subtle structure to the orange texture with some normals and roughness variations but maybe it was too subtle. And additionally the overall form / mesh look to stiffy I’d call it… usually these vests are made from a very thin material and they bend and deform much more whereas this vest looks a little bit like made of a thick, not deforming material.
Just a question: I REALLY fight with the simulation in Marvelous Designer… sometimes the mesh starts to mess up or I don’t yet know which of the physical parameters I need to change to achieve what I want. Simulating in Blender is not working for me in general due to performance issues - I really have no idea what kind of NASA computer you need to run a cloth simulation in Blender smoothly. But when I try to sculpt clothing I usually start to mess it up as my work leads to weird distortions in the mesh and texture. My hope lay in Marvelous Designer as it places folds and the overall cloth without these distortions (but with many other issues)…
As I still lack enough experience: do you have any tips for creating more realistic clothing in 3d? sounds very general I know but I think more and more that clothing (after character design) may be the more complicated part - or maybe I simply miss some very basic knowledge / experience to get more realistic looking results.
Well, you’d be surprised to know that Blender’s cloth simulation can do wonders, even in my very modest i5 9th gen processor (cloth sim seems to only use processor and not graphic card).
