Link: Clothing Patterns

I'm fascinated with a lot of ideas. One of those ideas is creating patterned clothes using real patterns. Now that I'm happy with my tools, I'm taking it a little more seriously.

A lot of clothes are solid. So, shade in some wrinkles and its all good.

But what about putting a pattern on your clothes? The pattern gets distorted around the wrinkles. What about darts? How do you distort a patterned female shirt with darts?

Consider pleats on a skirt for a moment. Sure you can throw a pattern on the skirt layer, paint in some shading, and all call it good. But what if you want to use a plaid? How do you distort the plaid to take the pleading into account? Of course you don't have to, but it is an extra layer of realism. Besides, I find it to be a fascinating mental exercise.

So I have been practicing with my stuff. But my problem is that I don't know a whole lot about actual clothing patterns. I do know some basics, but really not enough for me to be comfortable to charge ahead with things. Shapes and proportions... things like that.

I started looking around. Boy was I surprised with some of my notions being way off base! I found a pattern for a vest and the pattern in my brain was way different. I couldn't believe how the waist line curved 45 degrees from the front cut.

Okay, more looking around and I found this Nugget o' Joy:



To me, that is an absolute treasure trove. I've only looked at a few of the patterns and my understanding of clothing patterns has already deepened considerably. Studying from a variety of angles and being extremely well-rounded just might be a good thing. Certaintly not absolutely necessary, but doesn't hurt.

Hopefully soon I'll be able to use MCH to make clothes using patterns with proper distortion for darts, cuts, and all that. Maybe I'll do the one vest that I found as a proof-of-concept.

Got anything?

pages in img tags need to have a search string indicator (the question mark) to be visible for most people reading

(it doesn't change the url, it's just an optional bit that goes unused by many pages, but it's required by the forum software to fool it into thinking it might be an image)

Your link is broken, you need to put a ? in the link (as I just added here) to make it show up with the image trick.

Bloody forums. I'm seriously thinking about starting my own. Thanks, Void.

Now this is what I'm talking about. From the above link, I took Elizabeth's vest (Pirates of the Carribean) and ran it through. My first real test run with plenty of errors to learn from. Started in Max with Splines + Surface = Patch. Unwrap UVW for two channels: first one being flat, and the second one being wrapped to the avatar. Export to MCH and then be all about Photoshop. (I even started some shading, but not much.)

http://tech-slop.serveit.org/wiki/images/elizabethvest01.jpg

The pattern was made for a doll and not the avatar mesh. So, some major tweakage needs to be done with regards to stretching in various places. A few rounds of trial-n-error could fix most of it, but I don't think the stretching can be made perfect. Made much better, but not perfect.

Another option would be to learn more about tailoring and make my own to fit the avatar mesh much better. That is, tweak the pattern itself instead of tweaking just the UVs.

One thing that really surprised me was the lines in the MCH file. I went to render the wires and I was very pleasantly surprised. It only rendered the patch lines and not the inner geometry. I did 5 interations of inner geom and they were not present in the MCH line data. So, in Photoshop, it was just like looking at the Patch lines without the inner geom cluttering things up. Of course I could to the inner geom lines, but it was very nice to see Multi-CH surprising me yet again.

This cracks me up. Literally, in a virtual sense, making clothes for the avatar. If you're gonna make clothes, then make clothes. Haha. I'm beside myself with a sly grin.

There have been many, many times when I have wished I could understand what you were doing, Abu. This is one of them. Whatever it is, it sounds fascinating. Keep up the good work.

if i understand this right ( a big if) Abu's attempting to generate a map that would take a normally repeating pattern, like a grid for instance, and apply standard tailoring pattern principles to it (things like darts, joins, various rotations and shapes based on size) to come up with how that patterned "fabric" would behave and look on avatar dimensions, and generate a pattern/transform that apply it in a realistic way to the avatar mesh, and generate a texture from it....

I think it's nuts considering the variety of av shapes, and real world clothing patterns, but for a small variety of each, it may be possible to get it close...

my guess is that the biggest problem lies in hidden face transformations, and the methods of RL tailoring that try to both fit a pattern to the widths of the fabric available, and try to produce the smallest amount of waste material

(but it really is a laudable goal, scary in it's complexity, and I'm in awe of anyone willing to tackle it)

Hi Abu! Good to see you are still rocking the socks off of these forums. I would totally hang out on yours if you started one.

Here's an idea for your current area of research: look into the projection modifier in Max. As you say, literally make the clothes by modeling items over the avatar mesh in Max. Patches, polys, whatever makes you tingle.

When you are done, set up a UV layout of the modeled outfit like you would lay out a good old fashioned sewing pattern. Texture it with the pattern of your liking like you are laying it out on a bolt of fabric. Then project the result back onto the avatar mesh and render it to texture. This gives tones of control. Depth data with the mesh information can be used for AO passes, painting with light, and if you are crazy modeling in wrinkles and stuff like stitches. If you are a ZBrush person this is where you divide to a million polys and paint that stuff on.

With your MCH voodoo you can set up custom UV layouts to get nice projections, then mangle it all up back onto the SL avatar UVs

It sounds like you are already doing something similar, and perhaps more elegant, but I just thought I would throw it at you.

If anyone else want's to try it at home with something other than Max, your application will have something similar. Just ask the resident Maya or Blender gurus where to find the buttons.

Pygora!

Actually, this whole tailoring thing is something that has been on my mind for quite some time. I've had more than a few false starts. Modifiers like Garment, Clothing, and things. Even tried Projection and Conform a few times. But I could never get anything to 'sit' right. Maybe I need to master these methods a bit better to make me happy. I don't know for sure either way.

One of the tricks is finding not only a technique that works, but one that you/I am comfortable with. For me, this is Splines + Surface --> Patch. It's a simple modeling method and I don't mind this kind of UV work. I wanted to go with Patches from the get-go, but for reason the UVs are whack. However, if I go Splines + Surface --> Patch, the UV work dandy. Go figure.

On a side-note, I recently gave Multi-CH's engine an over-haul. I was using a homebrew hack, but finally got around to changing things over to barycentric. OMG this is so much better. Before a plaid texture required way too much post cleaning, but barycentric is much cleaner and requires much less waxing. I didn't drop a note about this, but it's up and you should know where to find it.

And I finally got back to work on Bend This. Did lots of cleaning and a tutorial using the avatar skirt is on the way soon-ish. Quick-n-sleazy Abu style. Even took the 3DS Max TBN shaders for a spin on a sculptie and everything worked uber. I'll be releasing Bend This filter soon (again) and probably the Max shaders as well.

If you have a host that can handle Photoshop filters, I can release one Helluva dev pack. Imagine getting a custom sculptie with an MCH file and the TBN matrix. I get all tingly thinking about it.

Oh, on another side note, I finally managed to get precise sculpties out of Max and into Photoshop. I haven't been able to get precise sculpties out of Max no matter what I tried (shader method et al), so I did some more hackery. It's uber. I've even had some minor success doing this with NURBS and oblongs, but still too early to tell how feasible.

Anyho, I'm off to hack around some more and do some writing. Sleep? What's that?

I think most avatars need a couple of extra darts in the back

http://www.startsewing.co.uk/altering-sewing-pattern.html

Much more detail on alterations here:

http://www.archive.org/details/newdressmakerwit00butt

Holy smokes, Dom. The PDF in the one link is absolutely spectacular. I'm slowly working through it when I need a break. During my first glance through it, I was floored by some of the observations concerning sleeve alteration.

Fantastic. Many thanks for the awesome find.

Abu - I am intensely interested in what you are doing on this. I hope that you get the files finished for this because I will probably use the crap outta it! I usually have to "paint" those little things in and sometimes - I just get too lazy to do a complete job (IDK if it's lazy if you've spent close to 30 hours on a piece).

I'm subscribing to this thread - just for updates...

http://www.patternschool.com/

This is a site that addresses RL swimwear and stretchwear. You'll find info about basic block creation (master templates) as well as info on how to manipulate it into simple styles. It's a little off the path of "tailoring", but I thought I'd throw it in the mix 'cuz stretchwear is just as popular in SL as it is in RL.
The site has illustrations in popup windows, so remember to click the links to see the good stuff.

I got the boot, but I'm back. Only a few days this time.

Claire, that is awesome. One thing that I've really been wanting to do is one-piece bathing suites. SL needs more one-piecers. That will help tremenduously.

Sioxie, I'll do some cleaning up on the piece that I've showed and toss it up.

Like I said, I completely redid the engine. Latest version is 1b.



I started cleaning up Elizabeth's jacket vest thingie. Something went wrong in my original fiddle and some of the junk was rotated. Egads! So, I rebuilt the UVs from scratch.



I think that's about as close as I'm gonna get anytime soon. Some minor issues with some of the seams and there is some wobble on the outer curves. But I'm learning as I go, so hopefully I will only get better at this. One of the things that I have to get the hang of is manipulating the handles of the patch splines. They affect the density and flow of the inner geometry and that's why there is wobble in the outer curves.

Anyways, have at it and show me something.

Break time, then some tut writing for that other thread.

edit:
Ugh! Stupid broken forums! Go to your room until you learn how to behave!

If you manage to recreate something that looks like a well-tailored RL bodice with darts and seams, you will get complaints about the places the patterns don't match to the last pixel.

In RL dressmaking, you match the dominant lines of the fabric's design as well as you can. Some clothing patterns will tell you that they are "not suitable for plaids" or large repeats. You let the minor mismatches go, because it's the way it is.