After basically putting this project on hold for months to focus on other projects still under NDA, I’m making time for my portfolio again. I created a high poly tube top and a skirt/pant combo in Marvelous Designer, but after working with the skirt/pant clothing pieces in Maya for a little while I decided I wasn’t happy with the clothing design and remade the skirt/pant combo into a skirt/skirt combo.
High poly Marvelous Designer clothing viewed in Maya.
Now I’m working on the low poly clothing. When I create low poly clothing for characters I nearly always use the character body as a starting point, duplicating the mesh and trimming or otherwise altering it to fit the area covered by the piece of clothing. This ensures that as the body and the clothing deform, the topology stretches and compresses in the same areas to prevent clipping as much as possible. The exception to this rule is loose articles of clothing such as capes or skirts.
Armor is usually a different matter. It doesn’t need to match up because it deforms much less, if at all. I usually build a low poly base for armor in Maya, then send it to ZBrush to sculpt the high poly. I have created the low poly armor for the character already, but have yet to do the high poly sculpting.
Here is what my low poly outfit looks like at the moment. (The skirts are not pictured because the low polys are not finished after the re-design.):
