How to do Cloth / fabric / upholstery
I am looking for help and advice towards building / modeling better fabrics and upholstery. I work for a furniture design firm and my job is to do the 3d modeling and rendering. Although 90% of what we do are hard case goods, I am learning that it is quite difficult to model realistic fabrics, such as a sofas, dining chairs, cushions, and even harder for bed sheets.
My coworker, in the past has modeled the makeup of a made bed with the sheets, comforter and such. He does them in a program, called modo using some type of push pull clay feature. Unfortunately that is exactly what the result looks like, clay.
If any of you have any techniques or examples towards getting realistic fabrics and upholstery, please let me know. Your advice will allow me to prove that Rhino is far superior to MODO.
Thank you all
Tags: Fabric
Views: 742
Replies to This Discussion
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Permalink Reply by CarterTG on -
Cole,
Before the villagers grab their pitchforks, let me profess my allegiance to Rhino. It's method is logical and has a prolific set of tools to model with. There were times however that in attempts to make organic or free flowing things, the process of doing it through strictly Rhino made it FEEL like I had to think out 30 moves to get to my intended surface or shape. Occasionally, those 'organic' objects still didn't look organic enough.
Back then, I started hearing about the T-Splines plug-in. Exploring further, it basically extends the Rhino toolset by offering free form organic modeling within Rhino itself. Yes, like Modo it pulls and pushes and extrudes and scales your selectable choice of edges or surfaces or vertices. Your colleague probably didn't spend enough time for one reason or another, but free form modeling tools ARE capable of creating far sharper detail than what you were shown.
Nowadays when I need a free flowing part, I no longer get apprehensive about thinking out 30 chess moves to get to something that may or may not meet my expectations. T-Splines users employ several ways of starting their objects. I mostly stick with extruding from a curve or modify a T-Spline primitive. I've used it for all sorts of modeling including character and vehicular.
Within T-Splines' website gallery, there should be at least a couple immediate examples that would directly relate to your upholstery needs. I would highly suggest looking at their webinar videos to get a feel for its workflow. My lightbulb moment came when watching them effortlessly model a dolphin.
If I had to play furniture modeler for a day, I'm confident that the combo of Rhino and T-Splines will let me create anything the 2D folks wanna sketch out. This is all a matter of identifying and applying the right tool for the job.
There has since been a competing plug-in introduced called Clayoo. From what I've seen so far, I'll stay with what I've been relying on a daily basis. Either way, these free form plug-ins are essential tools to augment what Rhino offers. -
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Permalink Reply by Alex Manuele on -
modo is a sub d modeler. The 'look' of the finished object has nothing to do with the software - it's entirely in the hands of the modeler. If you look through modo's gallery you'll see what I mean -
http://forums.luxology.com/forum.aspx?f=8
modo and Rhino do different things, it's an apples to oranges comparison.
Having said that, working in one platform is always preferable to spreading yourself over several. I know because I often have to move from autocad to sketchup to modo and back again and there are always unexpected consequences. If T-Splines can give you what you want and you can do all your work in one program than that will be a benefit in and of itself, regardless of questions of which program is 'superior' to the other.
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