Blake Tutorial Series – Part 13 – Modeling Clothes…

In part 13 we go ahead and model some shorts for Blake.  Some really cool new Blender things this week!

**This one is quite long, over an hour, so grab a coffee before starting!**

Character Creation Vimeo Channel

If you haven’t already, I highly recommend that you take a look at my previous clothes modeling tutorial first.. The process that I show here is similar to that tutorial, but modified a bit.

The basic premise of modeling clothes with this technique is creating the garment, then adding a cloth simulator to it so that it falls against the body mesh naturally.  Afterwards you can apply this cloth simulation and have the garment keep that free flowing shape.  The downfall to this way of modeling is that when you add the cloth simulation to the garment, all of the details of the mesh (think pockets, zippers, seams) get “ironed” out because the simulation treats them as if they were cloth too.  This can be a bit annoying when you went through all the trouble of modeling all those little details, so I’ve modified the process a bit.

After you’ve modeled the highly detailed garment, create another, very low poly, mesh of the same shape, but slightly larger.  This is going to act as what is called a Mesh Deform object.  When the low poly mesh is deformed in some way, the high poly mesh beneath it will match the deformation, without a change in topology.  It’s very similar to the lattice modifier that we used last week, except that you can make it in any shape you want (as long as it’s a closed mesh, which I figure out in the tutorial!) instead of just the box of a lattice.

What this means for modeling clothes is that you can apply the cloth simulation to the mesh deform cage, and the high poly mesh underneath will deform the same way, except your details won’t be ironed out like they would be before, cool!