inca clothing and an epiphany

I’ve been clothing my Hanan and I felt the urge to write a small, basic, tutorial on how I went about it. There is a modelling technique that many people don’t seem to know about using the surface modifier and it is a real easy way of creating complex geometry quickly.

I started by wanting to build the thing round the Hanan's neck (I have no idea what it is called), while I could have used a tube and deformed it this method gives you a lot more control over its shape and makes future refinements stupidly easy.

I first created a spline for the outline the object and made sure it went round his body without going through it.

Next I clicked refine in the panel on the right (remembering to check connect) and then added some segments between the outer and inner rim. This is so that when the surface modifier is added it makes it easier for max to work out the curve, otherwise it creates the liens to straight. It is important to be aware at this time that using this refine method does not create one point where you click but two, one for each line and it is important that these two points remain in exactly the same place or the surface modifier will not recognise it as a closed path. For this reason you need to turn on area selection to make sure when you click on one point all the points in that area are selected

Next I added the surface modifier an already, just like that I have the shape I wanted (almost). But being me I’m not happy with just that, there is more

The surface has no volume so I added an Edit ploy modifier to the stack so that I could select the polys and extrude them a bit

Next I added a Symmetry modifier for obvious reasons.

This left a gap at both the front and back where I had not lined them up properly so on went another edit poly modifier, delete the end polys and weld the vertices together.

Lovely. all done (ish). Using this method I created all the clothes on the Hanan. Now if something later on doesn’t work quite right i can just drop down the stack and edit the spline and its done.

Quick bit of UVW Mapping later.

No this is where what I think is a moment of genius came to me. I had planned to just attach the clothes to him so they would deform under his skin modifier but I really didn’t like the idea of losing the stack for the clothes. So in what could turn out to be a moment of madness I have added a Skin modifier to the clothes and used the same bones that the Hanan has:

It only took a small amount of tweaking of the envelopes to get it working ok. Below is a test of how they all deform with the skin on.