Looking for an advanced clothing tutorial

First off I would like to thank everyone who has taken the time to post clothing tutorials , they are a great help for many of use .

Now that I can make a basic shirt I am hoping to find some more advanced clothing tutorials . The big questions that I have are on making templates for different articles of clothing , like how to get nice clean templates when trying to map out a bra .

I would also be interested in any " how to's " out there on tweaking fabrics in photo editor to give shading and a more realistic look .

Thanks for any help you can offer

Once you have learnt the basics such as making a t-shirt and how to create an alpha channel of your clothing shape , the rest really is looking at real life clothing or second life clothing and getting an idea of the shape of a particular garment and practising your drawing skills a little bit in Photoshop.

I would suggest if you do not have these already to get the wonderful Chip Midnight clothing templates.
Load up the template for the upper body (for making tops , bras..etc) and create a new layer and like you would have drawn out the t-shirt shape , this time draw out the shape of your chosen garment using the lines on the template as your guide.
Imagine the template as an actual body , look at real life clothes and their cuts and try to replicate this onto the template.

For fabrics there are all sorts of things you can do , you can add shading and highlighting to make fabric look more realistic.
You can do this by creating a new layer above the fabric layer , fill that layer with a kind of medium grey and then change the blend mode to Overlay.
Once this is down use the dodge and burn tool to make shadows and highligts on this layer that will be shown on the fabric layer below.

You could also use the layer effects dialog box located at the right hand bottom side of the layer pallete.

You're after very basic tutorials. Try reading the Tutorials sticky and the Alpha and Transparency sticky at the top of this forum and then take a look at Natalia's tutorials at .

And there's always the Wiki page here:

http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Clothing_Tutorials

Also, here's a tutorial on adding depth:

http://www.suztv.com/SL-ClothesColoring/Howtocoloryourclothes.html

The thing is, clothing is a vast and personal process, so everyone does it differently. The best thing to do is to browse a few of the tutorials listed, in order to gain a basic knowledge of how to do something, and then keep experimenting with different things to find what works best for you.

I use bezier curves to make clean template edges. In the Gimp, that's the Path tool.

Shading and depth is all highlight and shadow stuff, and I have a tutorial on highlight and shadow techniques at http://seshat-czeret.blogspot.com/2008/08/how-to-make-sl-clothes-in-gimp-part-3.html

Despite the tutorial name, the techniques can be used in Photoshop as well - just with (sometimes) different tool names and icons than the ones in the Gimp.


My tutorial teaches the techniques: it doesn't tell you where to put the highlights and shadows. That's because the placement of them is an issue common to all forms of graphic art; and I'm still not entirely happy with my own placements. Google something like 'draw clothes' or 'draw fabric', and find one which explains the placement of highlight and shadow in a way that works for you.
(It doesn't matter if the tutorial is for oil painting, or pencil art, or pastels, rather than digital art. The placement is the same regardless of medium.)