For those of you who have gone about this, how have you done so?

 

... and I do realize that it's a rather broad field, as wet clothes come in many conditions (a few spots, to drenched, to underwater), but I am interested in knowing how some of the experts and veterans achieve the look.

I've never needed to do this, but if I did, there's a few different ways to go about it.

It would depend a lot on how wet the clothing needed to be, and what type of clothing it is. A heavy coat is going to look and behave completely different when wet than a t-shirt or a pair of jeans would. The coat would keep most of its shape due to all the padding inside, but a shirt or pants would be practically skin tight. 

Again, would depend on a lot of factors, so you should be a bit more specific on the look you're trying to acheive. 

A soaked shirt could be done as a texture over the figure's skin texture with proper displacement maps for wrinkles.

Or you could take the shirt model into the cloth room and shrink-wrap it to the figure, then model in the wrinkles with the morph brush or in a modeling app. 

Dynamic clothing would likely be easier to work with for acheiving the right look than conforming clothing would, but either way you're probably going to have to create a lot of custom morphs to make it look believable.

 

~Shane

A lot of it could be achieved in post, if you just want parts of the clothing to look wet. In the case of wet jeans shorts, you simply darken the color where it got wet. If you are going for a T-shirt, you would follow Shane's advice for that.

I did wet clothing for an image I put in my gallery if you want to take a look at it. Everything I did for that image is explained there.

http://www.renderosity.com/mod/gallery/index.php?image_id=2416326&user_id=663573&np&np

Don't forget the way wet clothing drapes.  Depending on your poser version, the morph tool might be needed.

Just last night I was fooling around with the 'pressure' setting in Marvelous Designer (the cloth sim).   It allows you to inflate clothes (useful for making things like padded clothes and pillows) but there's also a negative pressure setting which will 'suck' clothes onto the body. Pretty useful for simulating clingy wet clothes, as it turns out. I don't know if poser's cloth room can do something similar?

Wow obm890 - how easy would it be to take that shirt from Marvelous Designer into Poser and rig it for use?

(Never seen or used Marvelous Designer before)

I haven't tried rigging after I've simulated, I prefer to simulate directly onto the posed figure geometry, that way the wrinkles respond properly to the figure's bends. I know some users are using DazStudio to create a conforming figure from a simulated mesh (exported from M-D), so with the new toys in PP2014 I imagine it would be easy in Poser too. 

I've posted a couple times on this topic in the past couple of years, so you might want to look for my posts. (I don't have time to dig them up myself.)

Here are a couple of mine, with notes on techniques:

Wet Nurse http://www.renderosity.com/mod/gallery/index.php?image_id=1843351&user_id=445066&page=4&member&np

Use transparency based on bump map. I rendered the picture with several levels of transparency on the dress, and postworked them. (Techniques described in test of render.)

http://www.renderosity.com/mod/gallery/index.php?image_id=1798141&user_id=445066&page=4&member&np

Took existing transparency and ran it through a map node (power?) to heighten the contrast. Removed nearly all the specular from the light to give a better underwater look.

http://www.renderosity.com/mod/gallery/index.php?image_id=1794569&user_id=445066&page=4&member&np

As for the previous. Normally I remove "visible in ray-tracing" for stockings to avoid the sort of artifcat you see here (a result of having to large a setting on minimum ray bias), but it works really well for underwater, looking like air trapped in the panty hose. (Works just as well for above water, with water trapped.)

http://www.renderosity.com/mod/gallery/index.php?image_id=1657400&user_id=445066&page=6&member&np and

http://www.renderosity.com/mod/gallery/index.php?image_id=1657401&user_id=445066&page=5&member&np

are a sequence. You can see how I increased the density on the dynamic clothing as it got wet, and increased the shine. (If it hand't been black I would have darkened it as well.)

http://www.renderosity.com/mod/gallery/index.php?image_id=1597520

Heavy use of dynamic clothes, and playing with transparency nodes.

http://www.renderosity.com/mod/gallery/index.php?image_id=1572546&user_id=445066&page=7&member&np

Lighting isn't very good, but this illustrates a nice technique. I used the diffuse input, inverted it, and turned it into a transparency map so that the patterns on her dress remain opaque.

Cool renders! It gives me some ideas as to how to go about it (though it would probably be far from perfect, especially when heading into advanced details and characteristics). Hopefully P10/PP2014 can do a few things in this field as well.