Tutorial request, general texture (hair & clothes mostly)

[HighLarius]

First of all, y'all are rocking it. Keep on living the dream. Secondly I'm at the point in my makeclothes studies where I am seriously considering textures for characters and how to make high quality ones. Specifically I'm not sure how people line up necklines/zippers/pockets etc. on the models so well. I've been dismayed to find there are no specific tutorials on creating your own clothing textures for 3d models (I use gimp/inkscape). For now my only answer is trial and error, which is fine if time consuming. I was wondering if anyone had any advice. Also I am interested in making high quality hair textures as well. I've seen some good ones that involve adding noise to an image and then giving it a motion blur, but there's more to this than that, right? How about the strands that extend beyond the hair lines? Or the alpha at the roots or the ends? Just fishing for a little advice. Thanks in advance.

[duststorm]

I think the best ways to get such details in clothes is either sculpting them (zbrush even has a brush for creating zippers), or by copying photo references.
The sculpting approach has the benefit that you only need very simple textures of the diffuse color of the object, all the lighting and shadows and detail come from the geometry. These effects can be baked into your texture if you want to reduce the resolution of your mesh.

The approach with photo references requires more fiddling in 2D editors and good quality photos are needed with nice even lighting and high resolution.
It's not so easy to find good pictures, and then there's the issues with copyrights, so it might be a good idea to invest in your own setup for creating reference pictures. This does not have to cost much: http://hackaday.com/2015/05/15/incredib ... ct-photos/
It could make things a lot easier.

If you're using photos, the way I do this, I first model the mesh in Blender, create a UV map for it, and then use 3D texture painting in blender to draw lines where things like pockets or zippers need to be. Drawing lines across seams helps you align parts better.

[brkurt]

First of all, y'all are rocking it. Keep on living the dream. Secondly I'm at the point in my makeclothes studies where I am seriously considering textures for characters and how to make high quality ones. Specifically I'm not sure how people line up necklines/zippers/pockets etc. on the models so well. I've been dismayed to find there are no specific tutorials on creating your own clothing textures for 3d models (I use gimp/inkscape). For now my only answer is trial and error, which is fine if time consuming. I was wondering if anyone had any advice. Also I am interested in making high quality hair textures as well. I've seen some good ones that involve adding noise to an image and then giving it a motion blur, but there's more to this than that, right? How about the strands that extend beyond the hair lines? Or the alpha at the roots or the ends? Any just fishing for a little advice. Thanks in advance.

You can get a big boost by downloading the 30-day trial copy of Marvelous Designer 4, and see how fashion designers solve the problems you have brought up.

You can also use the projects I have left on the MD forums; I posted as ZincChameleon. I was working on military ponchos, and martial arts uniforms, so you will get to see how to approach MD4 from a 3d artist perspective (most of the folks on that forum are coming from traditional fashion design).

[HighLarius]

Thanks you two for the info!