Thesis: The Clothing

With the hair a decent place a week ago, this last work week I turned to the clothing of the character. I was having second thoughts about my original designs, but came to like them once again. A change I did end up making was the general size of the clothing. I want them to appear large and baggy on the character. I want him to roll up his sleeve only to have it slip down again over his hands. Where the model currently stands, I need to simply scale up the shirt a little more.

 

Yes, he is missing his shoes. I am slightly stuck on what style of shoes he should be wearing. Sneakers, boat shoes, white, black, brown, I am just uncertain of what will tie into his appearance (most likely just sneakers given his younger age.) As for clothing dynamics I am also at a bit of an uphill battle. I have been searching to no avail for anyone who has any hints for how to properly do clothing deforms on a character without adding hundreds of hours of cloth dynamic cache calculation. I am still looking into it and will get back to you when I get over that hurdle. I will probably be able to figure out the clothing dynamics thanks to the hair dynamics, which are a lot of fun to play with. 

The other task I have decided to tackle this week is Zbrush. With the clothing modeled, I wanted to start sculpting the details in the fabric. I have only used ZBrush once before and that was years ago. Traditionally I use Mudbox for all of my sculpting needs, but the bottom line is that Zbrush simply offers more. It has been a program I have always wanted to get into but never had the drive to devote my time to a completely different interface. First impressions: I hate it. Zbrush's user interface is increadibly illogical from a 3D movement standpoint to a generic program standpoint. Its layout is oddly set up, models are not models but tools, and its difficult to move around an object - a feature that is extremely important to a sculpting program. Second impressions: I really like it a lot. Its interface may still be odd, but with the addition of a plug-in called ZSwitcher my moving troubles have been solved. ZSwitcher is a third party plug-in to Zbrush that instantly changed the movement scheme to that of Maya or Unity, the programs I use the most. It downloads fast and installs incredibly easily. It does cost 30 bucks, but they have a 30 day free trial that I just started. I would highly recommend this route to anyone who uses Maya often and is interested in ZBrush. With that problem solved I could finally start some sculpting, and Zbrush does a phenomenal job at that.

This is just the start point of the shirt sculpting. It still needs a large amount of work, but the speed of that work is increasing rapidly as I learn the tools better. Once the larger wrinkles are in I will be adding stitching and seems. One particular tutorial I was watching showed an easy way to develop your own seamless brushes in Zbrush for designing your own stitch. I should be able to create a few high quality stitch brushes to use on the shirt and pants to give them the look I want.