264 chapter 7 ■ Transpose, ZSphere Rigging, Retopology, and Mesh Extraction
Modeling Cloth: Wrinkles, Folds, and Drapery
Featured Artist: Ian Joyner
Modeling cloth can be a time-consuming and mind-bending experience. We all know when it looks
wrong, but what makes it look right?
To start, I make a plane and convert to Polymesh3d (so I can freely divide it). For this experi-
ment, I’m using a sheet draped on a rod for reference; feel free to use images, but to really get
the feel for cloth, it can be useful to have some form of “life model.” I always like to try new tech-
niques on a poly plane object. It is like a blank canvas; you can learn new brush features without
worrying about topology or form, so you can see how the brush reacts to your settings. I will
mention some settings I like, but I stronglystronglystrongly encourage you to tweak these or try new ways. encourage you to tweak these or try new ways.
Once I have a draped sheet and a poly plane, I divide it by one, and on my reference I fi nd
a few of the major folds, up toward the top, where the eye of the fold is. When looking at how
cloth drapes over an object, you will notice that central points radiate out where the underlying
form is causing tension, thus making dramatic folds. Since this is just a quick study, I grab the top
two that overlap and mask them of f on my poly plane.
Once I have the mask, it is a bit jagged, so I inver t
the selection by Ctrl-clicking of f my object, and blur the
mask by Ctrl-clicking on the object. Ctrl-clicking and
Ctrl+Alt-clicking are great ways to sharpen or blur your
selection, and by combining the two (blur a few times,
sharpen a few times), you can soften your selection
and get rid of any jaggedness.
Now that I have my fi rst main folds masked, I need
to make them drape. One of the fi rst tricks I like to do
for this is while the mask is still on, I go to Snake Hook
mode. You could use the Move brush as well, but I fi nd
Snake Hook is a little more organic for my needs. But to
get it to have the right feel—and by that I mean tension
in the middle—I need to do a few things. First I want to
crank up my brush to ma ximum size and turn the focal
shif t to about 40–60. For even more of that tension,
you could add an alpha with a sof t fallof f, but this will
work fi ne for now, as I am just blocking in my shapes.
Now I simply move the
two shapes down and away
from my plane (toward the
camera). This is not the only
way to achieve this ef fect.
You could use the new grav-
ity functions on a Standard
brush, but I like pulling the
points like clay. The nex t
thing to do is inver t my
selection and smooth out
the edges of the pull.
That is the basic idea
for my main bits of folding.
If I do this on a wholecontinued