I've been trying with very little success to model a skirt with pleats. I've seen it done, but for the life of me, I just can't make it work. Is there some trick to it that I'm missing?

Start with a circle then shape it into a cross section of a pleated skirt (like it would look if you were underneath looking at it from the bottom). Extrude that. That's how I would do it ;)

Laurie

Thanks Laurie, I'll give that a try.

Laurie - this is something that has been bugging me, too. Could you post an image? Having a hard time wraspping my old brain around your explanation!

C~

Laurie

The solution is... to do it in wings : )

Create a gear using the parameters box so you can set the number of teeth/outward faces. For instance I chose 12 to make three faces per quadrant. Select one outward face, hit the [i] key to select all similar. Scale uniform to suit. [Space] to deselect all and now select an inner face. Repeat above steps. You now have a solid 'primitive' you can export as obj and bring into blender to work the usual magic. Voila.

Laurie

Laurie

I'm glad that worked well for you. Not to knock blender at all - I've used it off and on from the very beginning and consider it a pro tool in its current form - but for just knocking out a quick mesh and unwrapping uvs I love Wings for its simple clean interface and unique toolset.

have you tried the skirt as dynamic LaurieA ??   I tried it once in hex (same method lots more work lol) but it didnt work as dynamic ! all the pleats "fell out" an it looked aweful, maybe coulda got it better if I had known more about the cloth settings I think! have fun

Yes, if you model pleats like that Poser's cloth room softens them a lot. Retaining the pleats with sharp definition would involve complicated fiddling with the properties and groups and I wouldn't know how to begin doing that.

i just ran a basic skirt with pleats through the cloth sim in 7pro with no issues except that it was too simple to deform correctly

in blender i started with a 16 point circle and deleted all but 1/4 of it and then added the mirror modifier to make modeling easier

i then copied it and deleted all but 1 edge on the copy and then multi subdivided that and moved the verts to make the exterior of the pleats

again multi subdivide to make the interior of the pleats

then subdivide again to keep the edges from washing out when smoothed

extrude to desired length and add several loops for deforming

export and import and add the controls