Clothes too stiff
cherpenbeck
Posts: 1,416
Just an observation. Newer clothing items often come with next to none wrinkles, which makes them look like stiff plastic tubes. In fact, several older clothing items for M4 or V4 look more natural. I do understand that it is a lot more work to make more realistic looking clothing, but the best character with marvelous skin details looks fake in these clothes, so my Christmas wish is: Dear PAs, if possible, please give us better clothing for Mike and Victoria and all the others!
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Comments
I second! I am drawn to clothing that has folds and drapes.
I'm not a fan of the lack of movement morphs with a lot of it. Seems like previous generations clothing had much more movement, however, I hope to fix that with VWD and hopefully making everything dynamic will make it look exactly how I envisioned ;).
Laurie
The very first thing I look for in clothing is folds and creases. This wasn't so important when I used Poser because I could add them with the morph brush, but with DS it's a real issue.
I second that. Folds are SUPER important or the clothes just look so fake. Also one of the things that drives me nuts is buying an article of clothing that is paper thin. Like on the hem and sleeves the cloth is soooo thin. I mean I can understand that on like freebie clothes and such, but if it's in the store and I'm paying my hard-earned money for it, it needs to NOT look like paper around the edges. Don't get me wrong, there are a lot of wonderful and greatly made articles of clothing in the store, but some of them really are lacking the realism that is the new direction of 3D art. We're getting more and more realistic looking characters, hair, environments - but the clothes, often times, are a dead give way and really drag down the realism of the rest of the image.
Oh and one more complaint (sorry!!) - items of clothing that look like they have several dye channels but it's only the flat "texture" that makes it look that way. So that when you get it and are like - cool, I'm going to dye this belt and that buckle and reshade that part and make those buttons shiny silver ...oh no you can't. GOTCHA! That's not a dye channel, that's a flat painted on texture made to look like a belt and buttons and all that. Uhhh stop tricking me! lol It's gotten to the point now where I don't want to buy anything unless the PA has posted a promo image with the dye channels as different colors. I LOVE the PAs who do that! I wish they all would. It just takes a couple more extra minutes and would really make a difference for people who like to reshade, redye, and/or kit bash.
TL;DR - More realistic folds, fabric thicknesses, and clearly show your dye channels, please!
Seeing as we're at it. Don't you hate it when you think you are getting several different coloured texture sets, when all you get is the same texture with a colour added to the same defuse image. Grrrr.
I actually don't mind that. If it gives the look you where expecting anyway, what difference does it make if it's a colored texture via a difuse channel or a colored PNG TIF or JPG texture that they just recolored in Photoshop? You get the same look either way - but it takes less time to download and less space on your hard drive it's it's defuse channel recolor rather than a JPG recolor. *shrug*
Maybe it's just me, but colours added to diffuse, as opposed to images with their own colours, look quite different when rendered. Read that as a "faked" look. The burnt in specularity and shading is replaced by a colourised version.
I agree with divamakeup,clothes need wrinkles movement and more shader zones ,I find this especially with the male clothes I dont buy the outfits that look stiff.
We definitely need the material zones tho. That's a pet peeve of mine too. I try to make as many material zones as I can think of when I'm modeling something cause I know how much I like to change things up. I figure most people do as well. And I've never heard them called dye channels before...lol. That's interesting ;).
Laurie
I agree about the wrinkles and I'm guilty of it. With me I was prop maker who only recently started making clothing. What I found was that I had to make the clothing polygon heavy to add the wrinkles in so I was torn between the cumbersome heavy poly clothing versus keeping the poly count low. What I have since done is to buy ZBrush. It is expensive but I think it will be worth it. You can add in your wrinkles, folds and such then tell ZBrush to re-figure the poly count and it will remesh it. I am making a clothing set and it will be my first attempt at using ZBrush to add in all those cool details.
I intend to learn it over the holidays. Well...start learning it. I think it's like the game of Bridge. Fast to learn to use but takes decades to get good at it.
Diva, one of the key things I do when retexturing is to create new material zones (or dye channels) is the Geometry Editor. Using it, you can re-assign polygons in a mesh to new or existing surfaces, which allows you to break out things like buttons, buckles, etc. The limitation is that the mesh has to have separate polygons where you want/need to break them out. So the buttons would need to be physically modeled, not just painted on a flat surface. But if the model can support it, you can do some really nice things!
One 4k texture map is worth 10s of thousands of polys...when it comes to memory (actually closer to a couple of hundreds) Or...how many polys can you fit into 50 MB?
Of course, subdividing a high poly model makes it even bigger...but if there's a good amount of polys to begin with, does it really need to be subdivided later?
Also keep in mind building for animation can mean lower poly counts, as it's 'cheaper' to process fewer polys when animating and rely on textures (bump/normals/displacement maps).
These days, 100K polys for a shirt isn't unreasonable...and it is probably faster to render than a lower count that relies on heavy subdivision and 'support' maps.
There is a trade off in having clothing with wrinkles, It often means using topology that often doesn't rig or map quite as easily (it puts up more of a fight to get it to co-operate:)). And for those not using MD, modeling it requires some slightly tedious but careful forward planning when building the model. But i agree that without them, the clothing looks alot less convincing -and yes It puts me off too.
Another another possible factor (Im not sure) but I have personally found that when using Iray - it can be alot more tricky to get subtle wrinkles to show up in renders, as iray lights tend to flood the scene - which is great in many respects, but not so much for wrinkles :). What Im saying is adding creasing is one thing, but then getting them to actually show up properly in your promos is another.
Excellent suggestion! I forgot that you could do that in Daz. Thank you! :)