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Fold Sculpting in Blender

Intermediate, Theory, Practical

Description
During this class we explore the brushes and techniques available in Blender to sculpt and retouch folds on a garment exported from Marvelous Designer. We can break the sculpting workflow in four distinct steps: The cleaning pass, the sculpting pass, the texturing pass and the alpha stamping pass. This class covers the first two of those four steps and the next classes will cover steps three and four. Today we talk in detail of:

  • How to clean a marvelous designer garment prior to sculpting.
  • What brushes to use and not to use to sculpt folds in Blender.
  • How to quickly add details using Blender’s 3d noises.
  • How to tell memory wrinkles apart from dynamic wrinkles and how to sculpt them.
  • How to add puckers around seams.

This class references other classes on outgang.studio such as the Cloth Anatomy class and the Seam Creation class.

This class is reserved for members.

Discussion

7 comments

  1. Shu Cheng Chang says:

    Fantastic series, Laura! I understand that the primary focus of this pipeline workflow is to refine our approach to art pieces, which may not necessarily be game-ready assets. However, would you consider sharing some handy tips on how to manually retopologize a high-poly mesh with intricate overlaps, like the pants from this class, to a low-poly mesh? I’ve always had a hard time trying to preserve those little details when baking from high complexity high poly mesh to low poly mesh.

    1. Thanks Shu! Yeah that’s a great suggestion for a future class. We’re actually really missing some content on the website to take a character from start to finish for games, it’s something I want to create at some point. Thanks for sharing your thoughts!

  2. Mathias Costa says:

    Hi Laura! First of all I just want to thank you again for this beautifully presented piece of tutorial. I’ve followed Outgang for a long time on Youtube (and that alone had a huge impact on my 3d art over the last few months), but I can finally be proud to say I got a subscrition to the web now.

    I have a question regarding Blender in general as a tool for the industry standard work, since it’s what I’ve used as a hobbiest for a long time now.

    As a professional 3d character artist, would you consider Blender a real competition to other software out there like Maya or 3ds max? Specially as a general use tool (modeling, retopology) when it comes down to producing high-quality pieces of character art. Would it be prefered for new artist to learn ALL 3 tools available or just to focus on learning one really well?

    I see Outgang really focusing on Blender lately, which I love, but I’m just curious whether it’s a choice based on popularity (since a lot of people use the program) or just for the fact that Blender is really catching up as a great potentially industry standard program.

    Thank you so much in advance!

    Cheers.

    1. Hey Mathias! Welcome aboard! That’s a great question and one I could spend a long time answering. The really short answer is: The quality of the art matters more than the tools used, so use whatever works for you as long as you’re making better and better art. The longer answer is: Blender is a real competition to the likes of Maya and 3ds Max in the sense that its tools are good enough to make high quality art but Blender hasn’t displaced Maya as the standard software at the core of most big-budget projects AFAIK, although I know studios who are using Blender more and more. Even where Maya is the standard software, I mean that in the sense that it is the software at the heart of the pipeline, not the software that artists necessarily use to model/sculpt things. That’s often up to the artist to choose. Many studios expect that an artist will have to learn certain new tools that are used in-house at the start of employment and therefore are more concerned with finding artists that have a keen sense of what makes character art good or bad from a technical and artistic sense than selecting artists simply based on the tools they use. Basically, there’s no black or white answer to the question beyond saying that the most important thing is for you to learn to make good art instead of learning software just for the sake of it, but to make that good art you will have to jump through multiple softwares. Sofwares are there to provide solutions to the problems that you encounter along the way in creating good art and some softwares offer better solutions to different problems. For example, Blender, through geometry nodes, provides an excellent solution to the problem of “how to export garments out of Marvelous Designer easily” but someone could simply limit their knowledge of Blender to that and get out of Blender the moment a garment has been converted properly if they desire to continue working on it in another software, such as Zbrush. Hope that helps and good luck with your journey!

      1. Mathias Costa says:

        Thank you so much Laura! That certainly enlightens the whole process for me. Looking forwards to learning more here!

  3. David Akopyan says:

    Super useful and illustrative

  4. Engin Hergul says:

    Perfect

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