I haven't been modelling a lot in the past week, because I've been bugged by something. Namely, that I couldn't figure out a good way to model cloth with realistic drapery effects and such. Patch modelling wasn't working well because there were too many things to take into account, too many bezier handles all over, and too much chance things were going to turn into looking like quilted material instead. I only box model when I want to model boxes. NURBs is just bloody goofy. Then I guess -- my wife says I woke up this morning muttering about how to do it. All I recall is that I woke up from a dream about someone standing with a bunch of deflated bicycle tire innertubes hanging from their shoulder. So I guess I did this subconsciously, or something. Like the guy who invented the sewing machine. I'm not surprised, as I'd done it before, and I knew it had to be gestating or I'd have just gotten over it. Anyhow, I'd come up with all these ideas on how to try and get realistic drapery and cloth. It was driving me mad and I couldn't model because I couldn't model drapery and swag. I don't know if that makes sense, but when I rub into a brick wall on something I want to do, I can't just go off another direction. Everything locks into solving the problem until I have an answer that works. It can take up to a week sometimes. I think this was like 5 days. I tried different cheat methods. I tried the demo of ClothReyes and wow, nice interface. How do I evaluate a demo if it won't do the calculations, though? I tried SimCloth. Ugh. The worst interface and the touchiest Max plugin I have ever had the misfortune of dealing with. From what I can tell it's great if you only want to drop a piece of cloth over something. I even had the idea (not discarded, don't worry anyone who's helping me with that) of getting help from P5 users and their cloth rooms, then using an exported object from its results. But the big thing was that even the P5 cloth room's cloth doesn't look really proper clothlike in the swag department. So it was still bugging me. So I came up with the result, and tried it on one of the most pain-in-the-bum types of things I could. This isn't chopped up or posable or anything, at least not yet. But it is a functional model and looks right, so I'm happy. I broke the cloth barrier!

BTW, that's no postwork, vanilla P4. The model is actually hand-modelled, no cloth simulators of any sort were used. It took ages, but I was developing my technique as I went. I can now apply this technique to any drapery and wrinkle forms and get good cloth models without needing any sort of cloth simulation programs. Once I have my own chance to exploit the capability, I'll share how my technique works.

I think I may have fogorren to zip up a vertex here and there. There were over 100 of them to do.

Very cool

That is awesome!! The folds are great, please share as soon as you can..lol Marque

Very interesting.....really great....good work on your discovery, we can call it " The Dodger Technique". Sharen

One thing that gets important for things like this while they're being worked on -- it's always good to know approximately what Poser will do with a given mesh before you finish and import it, so you do't waste time going down the wrong path. In 3DSMax, here's what I do to be able to look at it Poser-ified: Apply a Smooth modifier to whatever you're working on. Set it to Autosmooth, prevent indirect smoothing, and set the angle to 180. This is pretty close to how poser deals with smoothing things, and you can then turn on and off the modifier while you're working on the mesh (to see what you're doing, and then see what what you're doing looks like). Anothr tip totally unrelated to this, but that I have been asked about. A few people have asked me how I keep my edges clean on square-edged things in Poser without those weird shadows happening. My recent stuff is better at this, BTW, as it's something I picked up about a month ago. A simple exercise will explain it better than words... In Max, make a cylinder. Clone it and move it off to the side. Convert the second one to an editable poly. Switch to the polygon sub-object section and select all of the cylinder's polygons except for the caps. Detach the polygons. Reattach the polygons. Export both cylinders as an OBJ and import in Poser -- do NOT tick weld identical vertices -- and look at the difference. Your first cylinder will have the weid shadows on it, but your second will not. No chamfering, no beveling, same number of polys on both. What's the difference? in the first cylinder the cap pieces and side pieces share edges. In the second version by detaching and reattaching, you just duplicated the vertices on the edge -- while they are identical vertices, the cap piece uses one pair for an edge and the side piece uses another. The side piece still shares edges with the other side pieces either side of it, though. Poser will smooth between two faces that touch, but in this case, since the cap and sides both have their own edge despite the duplicate vertices, you have bypassed it's smoothing between the cap and sides because it finds no shared edge there. Simple, huh? This will also work for those pesky boolean problems that make it look like a flat face is made of shards of shattered shadow. Select all the polys that make up the flat face, detach them and reattach them. The flat faces will smooth with each other, but will not try to smooth around the other edge, which means their own smoothing will work fine and not be screwed up by being insterpreted as part of somthing that curves 90 degrees on it's other side. As a note, if anyone has read the UVMapper Pro tutorial with the 6-sided die example, that's how UVMP does it, too. It;s the same trick, UVMP just automates it.

That sounds logical...the problem we have is in AutoCAD, works way different then 3dMAX, so some of those options we can use, especially since we draw in solids. Sharen

Now that's cool, I remember well the drapery section of my sculpture manual, and that took a while to get my head around, looks like you've got it all worked out though. Coolness! :) later jb

WOW! I'm no modeler, but I have wished from the first time I used Poser for cloth to drape like that. And I'm not buying Poser 5, if I can possibly avoid doing so (falls under the category of 'Why borrow trouble when Poser 4 provides a perfectly adequate amount for any sensible person?'), so this just thrills me! I cannot wait to see what you do with this! :)

Really great work. I dod not think it was possible ! Compiler

I can't wait till he unveils the Dodger Technique.....see we have named it, it is yours. Sharen

VERY beautiful draping cloth! -dg

Looks great! I'm looking forward to reading how you did it whenever you're ready to share. :)

I think I can partly guess how. Since you mentioned the smoothing and since I remember DrGeep's tutorial where he showed the Poser Stairs with the vertices welded. ... Hmm... off to Max to test my idea ;o) Oh and don't worry, _dodger, I can't model a tenth as good as you anyway so even IF I should figure out how you did it (not really likely after all) you can be sure I' won't exploit it :o)

cool :) way to go, dodger! i think it needs an inverted V at the bottom, though. next time you're down at the library, try to get burne hogarth's 'dynamic wrinkles and drapery.' it's a drawing book, but very helpful with draping by hand! figure out how to do the y-patterns and the v-things, and you're good to go. :)

Bloodsong: I had page 94 open whilst doing this. The shoulder is the anchor point, and togas are cutto hang as evenly as possible, so there's no V or inverted V at the bottom of one. B^)

Okay, I'll go over a brief overview of how the modelling technique works, though not too much detail and no figures, just text. First, sketch your outfit. This is the most important step, believe it or not. You have to have to have top know what you're making before you try and make it. I'm surprised by how many people skip this step. When you sketch your cloth, as Bloodsong said, Burne Hogarth's Dynamic Wrinkles and Drapery is a good reference. If you're duplicating clothing from a catalogue, you should still sketch in the back half that you cannot see in teh catalogue. If you are modelling from real life be sure to have pics from all angles and be prepared to draw on them. Next, if you're using sketches this is part of your sketching work, if you're using photos break out the market and prepare to draw on some of your prints. If you're using printed reference (a catalogue or whatever), or you only have one set of prints, be prepared with a copy you can draw on without destroying the visibility of the actual piece. Look closely at the cloth you're modelling for the anchor points (if you're doing it from scratch, Hogarth's book will explain how to determine these). Anchor points are the places drapery folds radiate from. For instance, on a man's shirt most of the drapery radiates from the armpits, and a little from the top of the shoulder (the real shoulder, not the Poser *Shldr). In my toga, above, the anchor point is the top of the right shoulder. Burne Hogarth's book focuses heavily on active figures and stresses the Direction of Thrust and how if influences the wrinkles of cloth. However, if we're making Poser clothing, we don't know the direction of thrust because we're starting with a zeroed-out figure. It doesn't hurt, however, to design it towards the most common directions of thrust so that your clothing will look as real as possible in the most common types of poses. Moreover, it's also a good idea to keep those angles in mind even if you don't actually put the folds in now, so that you can design the model around doing it that way. Open up your dummy figure (if you're making Poser clothes often, I assume you have a scene saved with the figure you want to make clothes around.). If you don't have one, import the geometry for the figure you're making clothes for, collapse it to a single mesh, weld its vertices, and optimise it. Add a very slight Push or Inflate modifier if your software has this to 'thicken' the figure up to give yourself some leeway in the skin-fitting department. Switch to create mode. Look at your reference and pick your first wrinkle line. You want to be paying attention to the peaks of the wrinkles, not the valleys, for this. In your front viewport, create a spline and trace the shape of the fold. Switch to the other viewports to put this shape into three dimensions, refining it with more vertices, if necessary, to trace aruond the outline of the figure. Clone this spline (or create a new one using the same number of vertices) and fit it to the next fold. Continue this until you have lines running across the tops of all the intended folds. Don't worry about the valleys. Those come free with the price of admission. Next, create one new, small spline, of a specific shape. Make something that looks ike an upside-down cursive V -- a hill shape. Make it out of only 7 vertices, so that you have one vertex at the peak, one either side of it to make the top of the hill, one at either side base, and one in between these to smooth out the curve of the slope a bit. Make this in the viewport that is most perpendicular to the starts of your curve splines for ease. Make sure that all the verticess are corners -- no beziers here or it will make your shape unweildy. Pick your first or favourite curve and make it into a loft path, using the little hill shape as the shape. Place the hill shape at least one at the beginning, one at the end, and one at 50% halfway. For mine, I did 0%, 25%, 50%, 75%, and 100%. Adjust your loft skin parametres so that you can easily see most of the facets in the loft, except perhaps the parts that curve away (which you should see in another viewport just fine. I dropped the path steps to 5 and had the shape steps at 0. Now, switch into the loft sub-object mode and adjust the shapes that make it up. In places where several folds come together tightly (the Anchor Points), scale down the local X size of the shape. In places where thery are far apart, scale down the local Y size of the shape. The local Z size of the shape should not make any difference, as your spline is flat, so leave it alone. Otherwise, simply scale so that everything looks right. Do this to all of your fold paths. Now, get rid of the pesky splines (hide or delete) and hide your base figure for now. Convert the first fold and second path lofts to editable polys. On the second one, in the view most parallel to the path (for instance, the front viewport on my toga) zoom in to a level where you can select individual vertices. Use soft selection and try to set it so that by selecing one vertex from the edge, you will get selection on the row of vertices across the hill, and as little else as possible. Grab the first vertex and, with your stylus or a dead pen place the top on a point on the screen halfway between the corresponding vertex on the next loft and it's starting position. Drag the vertex to this position. Go on to the next vertex and do the same. When you get all the edges halfway to their corresponding vertex in the next part, switch to the other loft and do the same back the other direction. Then, using the other viewports (it helps to have the perspective viewport in wireframe for this), position the vertices again this time in the remaming axis's direction. That you're doing here is interpolating the two lofts edges together. You could just attach and select the two corresponding vertices and weld them, but you wouldn't get the soft selection, and we want that. Next phase, by now you should have all your edge vertices matched up. Attach the second loft to the first and weld all those edge vertices together. I call it 'Zipping up the seams'. Do this to all the lofts you're going to attach. Tweak it to not be self-intersecting, or at least not too much, as you need to. If you have further areas that need to be filled in and they do not wrinkle, just add in some planes or 0-step patch grids and fit them. Now, unhide your 'sewing dummy' and start pulling out any parts of it that accidentally intersect its surface. Pull the outer open edges' vertices down flush with the surface. where they should rest against the skin of the figure. Scale down to Poser size if you need to and lay in materials for your groups. Colour the facets that go over the lShldr with a meterial called 'LShldr' and so on. Once you have your groups painted in, export the whole as an OBJect and you can convert the materials to groups in UVMapper to make it posable. Make it into a conforming figure as you normally would. If you don't have a way you normally would, read Bloodsong's tut on how to make conforming clothing and use those techniques.

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heyas; killer. :) but it still looks a little odd along the bottom, to me. i think i know what it is, a little too tight, maybe? would there be some pleated folds down there? totally lost on the tutorial there, but i don't use max, so that's okay ;)