Sculpting the Clothing

 18-21/10/21 - Week 3

This week is mainly about finishing my sculpt so I can move on next week. Obviously, the next thing I needed to tackle was the clothing. I haven't tried to do stylised clothing before so I had to find some reference for the type of style I was going for.

I first started with the full length waders, I really wanted to get across the type of material and the structure of the folds so I was collecting a lot of reference but at the same time trying to get the style I was aiming for. It was a very convoluted process but eventually I found a way to create the folds I was seeing in my references, this was by using a couple of brushes from the Orb brush set pack that I installed;

You can find them here:

https://orb.gumroad.com/l/nOkHw

Full credits to Michael Vincente:

https://www.artstation.com/artist/orb

I mainly used the slash to create the indent or sharp, triangular points you can see on the references. I then blended these out a bit and was using pinch to refine and define. This was my first attempt:

At first I was pretty pleased with how this was looking and I assumed I was on the right path but after getting some feedback I found that I had actually gone too far with the folds and they were both too much and had a focal point to her crotch area which was not what I was going for. Looking at references for longer and toning down my approach a lot I ended up with a much better version.

This is much more refined and has the stylistic values that I was trying to get, I am much happier with this version and am really glad I followed the feedback here. The only issue was that this took me a whole day to deal with and create, the lack of experience with clothing and stylisation in general was really slowing me down here.

I then began to block out some more of the clothing.

Working into this was also quite confusing as again I fell back into wanting it to convey the material so much and this needing to be somewhat realistic which obviously is missing the point of stylisation in general. I was unable to get feedback during the main bulk of rendering out the clothing and this meant that my results were far from the quality of the waders.

As you can see, the issues that appeared with the waders in the first place was echoed in the rest of the clothing here which wasn't good as once I got feedback I had to readjust everything which used up time and also told me that I had wasted time in adding so many folds.

The main issues are the lack of silhouette, the folds don't play into it and it had also changed from my original design which was pointed out in my feedback and was really helpful as I think the changes I have made from this screenshot has really improved a lot of things. Another main issue was the lack of resemblance to most stylised pieces which really throws the whole design off as the more semi-realistic folds doesn't match the stylised nature of the face and hair. The only thing I was happy with here was the fish hat...

Here is my improves design, there is still some things I would change and to me personally the type of material isn't conveyed well enough but I think I am missing the visuals of how it will look when textured as the roughness will tell a lot more. Overall, the silhouette is much more true to the original concept and I am much happier with the way that the clothing fits on the character and adds to it a lot better.

I think I still have a bit of refining to do but I need to move on to adding the props in now as its very important that next week I have enough time to low poly my character as I have a feeling it may be difficult and I struggled with creating clean topology last year. This part of the project in general was rather frustrating and I wish that I hadn't had wasted so much time on figuring out the looks of the folds as I would have been able to have more time for my prop creation and wouldn't have had to rush some parts at all.