Today we are going to model, UVW, and paint the texture for a camouflage hood.

We are going to only focus on this part for the sake of time. Apply the same principles of other items of clothing.

Reference

First thing is, you need reference, so your model and textures are informed by the real world. Even if your work is fantasy, sci-fi, etc., you will want to strengthen the effect of your work by sourcing your images on actual things. In this case I located the hood I wanted at 3d.sk. You can do other searches on the web, for clothing, armor, leather, or cloth materials, etc., for your designs, take photos, or better yet, collect source images and build up detailed drawings to work from.

In this tutorial we are just going to use conventional methods to UV map a hood, then, use some photographic reference to position and clone a fabric.

Virtual studio

By now we should know how to make this setup. You will need to go through this process unless you are very experienced and intuitive in 3D. Starting with the images and setting up this studio took about 5 minutes.

In position ...

Make you model ... leaving how you do that up to you. Remember, this is low poly, so make every vertex count, but don’t expect perfection.

It sometimes is useful to turn on back face cull to see the inside of your cloth.

UVW Unwrap

This is showing the older way of mapping UVs. The pelt map method is show in the other tutorial. If you use the pelt mapping, skip down to here.

Apply Unwrap UVW and select front faces. Planar map on Y.

Same thing on the back:

Select the top of the head and planar map on Z

Plane map best align anything that seems streteched

Situations like the eye, where there are desirable open edges, make sure the seam [green line] is actually on teh outer edge, not mixed up inside the mesh.

Turn on show vertex connections and weld vertices.

There will be stretching so turn on constant update and move at the edge or vertex level.

There is a seam in the material of the hood, so we can use that as a seem in our uv faces.

Use break to make a ragged seam up and down the center of the hood

The relax tool can be useful to fix stretches. Select a messy area

And go Tools/Relax Dialog ... hit Apply.

You can scale faces, use the edge loop selection tool and move edges, all sorts of things. You might not get teh squares perfect, just get rid of any obnoxious stretching.

Sometimes doing the planar mapping on a segment is helpful. Here I made a second application of the crown of the head, since I broke it in half. I was able to get a shape that is more conducive to welding to the face.

OK, there is our hood, UV mapped. It is possible to get it better, but that will do for our purposes. Ther is more room for other objects in our

Photoshop

I’m using the pelt mapped UVs here, so the UVs are in a different position, but, principle is exactly the same.

Render a UV template of the default 1024x1024.

Make a Difference blend mode layer of the template.

Drag parts of your source files into your PSD file and manipulate into place.

Here I am dragging the eye and mouth into place. Why? Because of the seaming in the fabric, I want to show that detail.

Use the stamp tool to extend fabric where you don’t have enough. Alt click to sample an area of camouflage, then “paint” with the image. To retain the fabric texture feeling, “click” to fill, do not stroke.

To retain the texture, use the airbrush tool and “dot” in the textures – do not “stroke” with the brush.

Anything outside the template doesn’t matter. We’ll clean it up later for a better presentation.

Copy paste various pieces of folds from the source images. Erase unwanted pieces and blend them roughly.

When you have places you want to continue an pattern, make a selection and fill it with the clone stamp tool.

Sample some dark green.

Keep making shape selections and clone stamping to fill.

Check you work every once and a while by saving as a jpeg and viewing in Max.

Turn up your material self-illumination to 100 ... turn off edged faces (F4)

A clean up tip is, using the magic wand on the template layer, selecting what is outside of the areas you are painting, then go to lower layers, and deleting.

You can also always Ctrl E a layer to make it merge down to the layer below.

Set the magic wand tool to no anti-alias and set to contiguous.

This concludes the tutorial on using cloning on source imagery for cloth.