Hi. I want some advice about cloth unwrapping. There’s a few characters I want to texture, but some of them had patterns or gradients on their clothes.
For example the boots of this character. It has a scales-like pattern and a blue to gray gradient. I saw unwrapping legs is about cutting a cilinder for the legs and around the ankle, the feet is separated. But In this case how can I make the ankle and feet have continuity so the gradient doesn’t seem cutt?
I textured my first model on Illustrator using .svg files because of the patterns, layers and working with vectors so I don’t loose quality. But I’ve seen another 3d model creator (Shonzo) who paints the models directly on blender. Don’t know which way is better.
If you have also some advice about wrapping clothes with patterns or gradients in general I’ll be very gratefull, too! (I know in real life even some shirts have continuity problems on the seams, but I’m talking about cuts where there isn’t a seam)
I assume you mean that when you cut the mesh at the ankles, the two UV islands don’t line up and you can see the seam where the two textures don’t align?
If you look at the letters on the foot such as ‘HE’ & ‘GF’ they are much bigger than the ‘A4’ on the leg, so your textures will be magnified on the foot part, compared to the leg. You have to scale the UV island of the foot so that the letter sizing approximately aligns in size / proportion with the ones on the leg.
Avoiding / Fixing the seams can be tricky if you only have illustrator or even just blender texture painting available to you, If you have Substance Painter it’s much easier, it’s a bit technical so I suggest seeking out tutorials online for that.
2.2. Another option - to avoid doing all the painting stuff, you can get pretty savvy with procedural textures where you can replicate that look in the illustrations, but that will require you to do quite a bit of learning on texture nodes etc…
I’d say learn to paint the models directly in blender to get used to the tools & how to handle certain problems, it will open up your work flow a lot more, Illustrator & Photoshop are great but can be a bit limiting compared to what you can do when painting directly onto the 3d model.
You may use a gradient based onthe object coordinate an mix it with the text. After you are satiesfied you can back the gradient only to a texture and mix it with the original texture to produce one final texture…
Soo let me clarify If I understand it well. Is like, painting the gradient on blender, exporting that image and adding the pattern on the external software? Illustrator in this case.
Thanks for the reply. Though I didn’t understand 2.2 point very much.
I saw I can avoid the ankle cut by painting directly on blender, I just have the issue with the pattern. I don’t know If I can do something like, paint whatever I need directly on blender, save that image and then adding externally the pattern? Don’t know If that would also add the pattern on the model.
A better practice is to add a seam down the back of the leg, and another seam around the edge of the foot so that the leg and top of the foot unwrap as a continuous UV with the sole as a separate UV.
Since most of the foot is visible it is easier to get a continuous texture and you just have to decide on how to line up the texture on the sole…
