sculpting cloth

Titouan Olive shows you the best way to create convincing folds and seams on clothing

The best way to create realistic folds and seams on clothing in ZBrush

When it comes to character creation sculpting cloth is something you need to master.

The most important and difficult elements of sculpting cloth is the global shape of the folds. You have to understand how the underlying character’s anatomy impacts on the flow of the creases. Folds are mainly created by tensions points and shouldn’t feel random – each one is there because of something.

The shape of folds is also dependent on the nature of the fabric (thickness and rigidity) so you need to know which type of cloth you’ll be working on before starting anything.

In this tutorial, I’m going to show you how to sculpt a realistic shirt. Studying reference is certainly the best advice I can give here. Choose several good images of the same shirt on the web or from fashion magazines, and start by studying the main shapes and the flow of each fold, keeping those references close to hand while you work. Sculpting clothing is great training as well as a very good way to improve your skills.

For this, I’ve prepared a model in ZBrush with a shirt ready for sculpting to help you focus on the most important part. We’ll also use a bust as a base to place the shirt correctly and to sculpt folds accurately, keeping in mind how the underlying anatomy impacts on the shirt.

This bust is also provided with the scene to make your life easier but you can choose to import you own model instead.

We’ll start by blocking out the main shapes of the figure. We’ll then push the details higher to add more realism, sculpting finer folds as well as seams. For all the assets you need go to www. 3dworldmag.com/vault