WIP Update #11: Seams and Stitches (Patreon)

Clothes! Really, the main motivation behind no nudity november is I've been playing around with better ways of making them, and I kind of want to play catch-up on the number of useable garments I have. 

For the uninitiated, clothing is extremely hard to do properly in 3D for a few reasons. First, clothes are just naturally hard to model, you have to add lots of fiddly and time consuming details to sell the effect, but also the kind of details are particularly hard. Long, thin things like seams and hems just don't gel with the tools available in most 3D packages, and writing custom tools is actually pretty impractical in a lot of cases. You can't even get away with skipping that step, neglecting to do your hems properly gives a very unnatural "razor edge" that totally breaks the illusion. Second, the material properties of cloth are, to put it lightly, both variable and complex. A material that's made up of thousands of sub-millimeter thick threads is always, always going to be a huge pain to generalize once you consider the  astronomical number of ways they can be woven together, and how drastically those variations can affect the final look. Finally, rigging is an absolute nightmare - with the exception of muscle systems, all rigging tools are built to handle thick, locally convex meshes, especially not ones that normally exhibit the weirder transformations, like a twil weave shearing all over the place.

There are industry standard solutions to these problems. With sculpting tools there are shortcuts that can be hidden well with retopology and baking, PBR texture sets can be captured to approximate the look of common cloth types, and the body of the character inside their clothes can simply be hidden or deleted. Game studios especially have got very good at this process. This approach works well for safe for work projects. We want to see through clothes! We want to see them coming off! We want to see the body underneath! This makes everything much harder.

So what am I doing? well, I've tried a lot of things and met almost exclusively failure - I was knee deep in writing a pretty complex addon in 2019 before I realized it wasn't going to work - but now I've started to put together a relatively robust workflow. Using displacement maps, blender's cloth brush and a library of seam and wrinkle brushes, pretty convincing garment details can be added without having to actually exhaustively model them - that alone means I can make a garment in a day, not a week.  For a long time I've been working on some very elaborate but shockingly effective procedural weave and knit materials that I've been getting better and configuring and layering to give more and more dynamic and convincing effects - really, that's just a lot of research on the optical properties of various types of cloth, and then trying to as closely as possible recreate that mechanism. Finally, I've settled on a modifier stack that requires minimal rigging, keeps the mesh roughly outside the body, and crucially is very easy to fix where it isn't quite perfect with shape keys.