Attached Link: Selwy's cloth brush tutorial page

Hey. Well, here's a shot of my render settings and the shorts with just a normal map and not the diffuse texture I posted. You can see that a lot of the work is done via the normal map and the diffuse just pushes it a bit more.  That said, while the mesh itself is pretty good there's some minor distortion in the UV's along the front flap area, which is why you get  the sudden size difference in texture. Is that the artefacts you're speaking of?

The texture isn't tileable by default. That'd be something you'd have to setup manually. It was designed to fit my need, so all I had to do was use it as is, not pattern fill it or anything. I just placed it on top of my 2048x2048 template for my shorts. So if you used it like a tileable pattern, then yeah, you're going to see rectangular shapes where the pattern starts and stops. I guess a tileable pattern would be of more use, I hadn't considered that. Sorry. :-(

 

Modeling wise, I try my best to keep the polygons on the mesh as even spaced as possible (note that this isn't always possible to do in detail areas).  To actually create  the shorts I used masking in ZBrush to extract out the base form. Then I Sculpted out the idea of the shorts, using Lazy Mouse and ClayTubes to roughly define the seams. I then took that into Topogun to create the final topology. There I was able to draw a new topology directly on top of the old one. This made it easier to plan where to put detail and with the Relax brush in Topogun, I was able to smooth out the spacing of the polys a little.  Then I went into Silo to do an extrusion on the leg and waist openings, so that there appears to be some thickness to the shorts. It was here that I created the belt loops also by copying sections of the mesh, applying a Shell command on them and then bridging the sections back onto the mesh.  I also extruded a bit of depth for the pockets.

Then I went into Headus' UVLayout program and UVMapped the mesh based on the seam guides I made. In hindsight, I probably should have done a few more cuts but eh....whatever. I think it still works.

Once that was done, I went back into ZBrush with the new topology. I subdivided about 3 times to have enough polygons to start painting out the wrinkles I wanted. Using Polypaint only (meaning ZAdd/ZSubtract were turned off), I painted out where I wanted wrinkles.  White for peaks and Black for valleys and used the smooth tool (again, with ZAdd and ZSubtract off) to blend between them a little bit.   AT this point I could have tried using Mask by Color to help make the wrinkles but instead of doing that, I just went in Selwy's Cloth brushes (Fold 1 and Fold2 see link), the DamStandard brush set to ZAdd, and the Form Soft brush to get the wrinkles. I wanted the look of clothing that had been ironed in the past, so I added some lines in the front where someone may have pressed the shorts a bit. 

 

To do the seams, at first I used Bryan Sylvia's Jean_Stitch brush  which worked pretty well but I had a hard time in some spots with it so I then did a combination of ClayTubes brush (ZAdd), DamStandard (both ZSubtract to define the crease and then ZAdd to lift the seam), and the Form Soft brush (used to add the dimples in the seam) wherever I was having a hard time using hte Jean_Stitch or for cleaning up a stroke.

For the final bit, I used Surface>Noise with my diffuse texture as the Alpha (see lower left corner of Surface>Noise for Alpha Load) set to UV instead of 3D....or was that 3D instead of UV? Anyway, it got the job done. I applied that to the mesh and I then generated a normal map. 

Then in Poser I loaded the mesh, auto rigged it (still cleaning that up), applied the normal map plugged into the Gradient Bump Channel (set to Tangent Space) and loaded the texture in this thread as my diffuse with no additional editing done to it. 

Later, I tried running it through Ddo, so I had to generate an Object Space (aka World Space) normal map as well as the Tangent Space map I had previously made. My goal was to use Ddo to dirty up the texture a bit (the Object Space map would help guide the direction of the dirt) but I ended up not using the result. Not because it wasn't good but because after talking to my girlfriend, I realized that maybe it'd be better to leave the texture clean.

So that was my process. I hope that helped in some way. It took me, all told, about two to three hours - most of that time was in Topogun, planning the detail areas. The actual sculpting was about an hour tops.