#clothing tutorial

“Notes on skirts and pants”

The doc might seem long/overwhelming, this is because I wanted to be very, very precise, truly step by step. Every single task by itself is just a matter of clicking buttons and takes a few seconds, except for altering the UV lay-out and the off-screen mesh editing. This is a repeat (but more precise) of things I wrote in this big 4To3 tutorial , as well as functioning as a written version of the contents of this video

I touch upon how to nicely convert the specular, normal map & main diffuse (and other swatches) of a TS4 item to the TS3. Because I only do maxis match/mix stuff it is done with that, but you could extrapolate this to different cc aesthetics & conversions from other games.

I use blender 3.6 and photoshop 2025.*

*for your photoediting program, a very important thing is that it allows you to open DDS files with the alpha layer shown as a channel you can disable/enable/remove/replace, instead of only being able to open it as the sheer image as-is.

threw together a little guide for a friend of mine on how i think about shirt collars because he was having trouble drawing them and im a certified clothing freak.

Ill actually give u the next best thing, I’ve been waiting since forever to make one of those little clothing tutorials so I decided to make one centered on folds and the dynamics of clothe since I see those being some of the biggest things most ppl struggle with

ENJOY THIS ITS A TAD ROUGH !!!!!!

Well I have some bad news. If you want a decent understanding of how to wrap your character in clothing you must first understand the shape of the body you wish to wrap in clothes.

I draw the body before the clothes every. Single. Time I draw a person.

I’m not saying that you need to practice realism or even necessarily need to draw the body without clothes every single time. I’m saying that you should be practicing understanding the form of your characters body. Your character could be a stick figure or the most realistic thing in the world, it doesn’t matter. You need to understand that the drawing you make isn’t just two-dimensional.

What you’re actually doing is building a complex 3D model inside of your brain and then putting it down onto your paper/canvas/digital whatever. Or, if you don’t have that ability yet, you learn how to do it via learning the shapes of the form of the body, memorizing those shapes, and then you realize that you can twist the 3d model in your head to get what you want.

And then there’s wrinkles in clothes. Always important to study references, however, most of the time I just fudge it and it works well enough. So, TIPS ON HOW TO MAKE YOUR WRINKLES LOOK NATURAL.

These are the basic steps I take when drawing wrinkles.

Some other stuff to keep in mind:

If the fabric is stiff, then you’re going to want to use stiff straight lines to help convey that feeling. If the fabric is soft, then you’re want to use rounded lines.

The tighter/thinner the fabric, the more wrinkles that’ll pop up when it bends. The looser/thicker the fabric the less wrinkles you’ll see.

When the arm twists, so does the fabric. The tighter the fabric, the more closer together the wrinkles are. The looser the fabric, the wrinkles go up the entire sleeve. Also, the more twisted the fabric, the more it compresses against the arm. I know that that’s hard to visualize with just words, so I provided a couple of examples below.