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576 Chapter 8: Modifiers
Shirt pattern and shirt sewn together with Garment Maker
Modeling Clothing
Garment Maker is a useful tool for putting
together patterns and adjusting seams, but you
can also achieve good results by modeling with
the standard 3ds Max tools and using Cloth on
top of these meshes. You can create clothing with
polygons, patches, or NURBS.
Impor tant: Keep in mind that modeled clothing must
not have any overlapping vertices or interp enetrating
faces. This type of geometry can cause the simulation
to fail. Using Garment Maker; you will not run into this
problem. If you are careful in creating your mesh, then
this is an easy rule to follow.
Pros and Cons
When designing clothing, Garment Maker is
usually the best way to go. It lets you define
seams, seam strength, pleats, and other clothing
parameters that cannot be defined with clothing
modeled via other methods. Either metho ds lets
you define separate portions of your clothing with
different fabrics, but Garment Maker gives you
greater control over this. The advantage to using
modeled clothing is t hat it can sometimes b e a
faster setup with familiar metho ds and it’s a g reat
way to repurpose older clothing models you have
made in the past. Using polygon-modeled clothing
can result in overly regular creases and folds.
Garment Maker uses a Delaunay mesh, which
tends to avoid this problem. However, the irregular
triangulation can result in rendering artifacts
for low-resolution clothes, so it is advisable to
apply the HSDS modifier after Cloth on gar ments
created with Garment Maker and subdivide all the
triangles once.
Note: MeshSmooth does not give good results with
Garment Maker meshes.
Left: Garment Maker Delaunay mesh
Right:Modeledquadmesh
How Cloth Work s
Cloth exists within 3ds Max as a pair of modifiers:
Garment Maker and Cloth. Between these two,
you can turn just about any 3D object into a
cloth object, or you can create clothing in a more
traditionalmethodfrom2Dpatterns,andthen
sew the panels together. However, before getting
into the specifics of the two modifiers, it’s us eful
to discuss how to preplan for using Cloth. This
includes how geometry affects Cloth b ehavior as
wellasthedensityofthemeshesyouuseasfabric.
Effect of Geometry on Cloth
Ideally , the way you model your cloth should
notaffecthowitbehaves. However,inpractice,
thenatureoftheclothgeometryimpactsthe
simulation. First of a l l, t he density of the mesh
defines how fine the folds are that can develop. If
youcreateaplanewithonlyninevertices,when
you drape it over a sphere, you are obviously not
going to get much detailed folding.
In addit ion to this aspect, there is the nature of
the edges in the mesh. Folding can o ccur only