I trust that I’m not alone when I say that skillfully sculpted clothing is quite impressive to behold. When it’s done right it’s easy to understand the type of fabric, thickness, and flexibility. That’s the purpose of this tutorial! As part of the “Art of Sculpting” collection, the goal is to get back to the basics of sculpting and improve fundamentals. This means no talk of topology, modeling, textures, rigging, or animation – simply sculpting. Like every facet of a sculptor’s skill set, fabric and clothing requires plenty of practice and patience. The techniques in this video are designed to establish an understanding of fabric characteristics that can be applied to any fabric-sculpting task.
First I’ll show you how to observe clothing reference images so that you can interpret fabric behavior.
You will learn about the concept of “peaks and valleys” and why that’s so important to understanding and predicting clothing behavior.
See how brushes like Crease, Inflate, Pinch, and Grab are useful for sculpting fabrics.
Due to the logic nature of fabric, once you have a basic understanding of the characteristics you can begin to predict its behavior and eventually sculpt it believably without reference. This is because fabric will always be pulled in a global direction by forces like wind and gravity. Subsequently it will always wrinkle according to the object(s) that hinders its gravitational and/or windy tug. And that’s the skill that I want you to take from this training. So let’s sculpt some clothing!
