■ Building Accessories with Topology Tools and Mesh Extraction 265
bunch of areas, I’ll go into a refi nement stage and use a new tool, one of my favorites, the Pinch
brush. The Pinch brush has a few uses in my workfl ow. The biggest one is using it for wrinkles and
folds, and also for tightening details. For this stage, I am going to use it to draw on some folds.
First I change its settings and turn the Brush mod slider up—something between 40 and 60 should
do the trick. Next I change the focal shift to something close to 70, and fi nally I’ll add a nice soft
alpha. This will make a nice pillowing ef fect as I draw.
When making mechanical or cloth things, I like to toggle the LazyMouse mode on and off
in the Stroke settings. This tool has a few options you may want to adjust as well, mostly in the
stepping area, if you are getting a “dotted” look to your strokes.
Using a combination of the mask and the Snake
Hook brush to push and pull folds and cause nice
overlapping, along with the Pinch brush to sharpen
edges and add indentations, I begin to see the drap-
ery I want. When using the Pinch brush, I fi rst use a
low intensity, and draw along a few of my main fold
lines. Holding down the Alt key, I’ll cause the inden-
tations and begin to add much more contrast to the
shape of my subject.
It is fairly jagged at this point, so I divide one or
two times and do a fi nal cleanup. This is just a rough
sketch to get used to the tools—feel free to take it fur-
ther than I have at this stage. At this point, follow your
reference or just have fun with it. The only two brushes
I used in this whole experiment were Snake Hook and
Pinch, and though it could use some refi nement, I
think you can see the form taking shape.
OK, those are the tools; take them
further to apply this technique to some-
thing with some form behind it. The fi nal
image shows a pair of pants made with
the same process. You’ll fi nd it’s easy, just
using the Move, Pinch, and Infl ate tools,
to create some nice wrinkle effects. When
I make wrinkles, Pinch with a high falloff
is my weapon of choice, but I still use the
other brushes to bring out certain details
as well.