Second Life Mesh Design of Clothing Using Avastar, Blender and Zbrush Part II

  Well here goes the continuation of my work flow with some more images / screen grabs of my work in Blender, Avastar and Zbrush used in the creation of mesh clothes in second life. So I was explaining the work flow I use in the creation of second life mesh clothing and this is really quite easy for the most part yet the item will change some here and there. My whole goal is to sculpt, paint and texture the 3d object or well 3d item of mesh clothing ... and do this mainly in zbrush and then after moving it to blender to create the uv maps then exporting it back to zbrush to create the textures and normal maps or the bump maps for use in second life. This is a process that will require you to be somewhat fluent in both Zbrush and in Blender. As well unless you have a working version that is able to run both gob and avastar ...   Mine will not pass the model correctly and this could be a bug created with the importers and the avastar Plugin not understanding what we want to do ... so I just will export and import as a .obj from blender and zbrush back and fourth .. then once I have the details done will use blender to export the clothing as I have to seeing that you cannot actually rig and animate the correct way in Zbrush. Now if it was a plain collada file with out and animation ... there is a plugin that will work to export these for zbrush but that will not store or transfer a rigged file containing animation information.  So now say we do not create any seams we will come up with a uv map that will be exported back into Zbrush with the Mesh Bra Object .... in fact it should be already included in the object file ...  the unwrap process took place in blender and can be seen below

Now the cool thing is that when I imported this to Blender from zbrush the first time it came over already correctly fitting the avastar avatar and as well in exact spot because I used and exported version of the model that I extracted the mesh from a exact version of my second life avatar shape. So I could decide that I want to make seems on this model rather then have it round like this ... it would not be that hard to texture the way it is but with seams it may be even easier, this is all in personal preference..... I will show you the UV map again in this post or the next after I added two seams ... but now I have again imported this into Zbrush after exporting just the bra from Avastar and Blender ... in order to just export the bra you will need to be in Object mode and have the Bra selected and then when you get the export box you will check the selected only box in the export window. So now lets import the object into zbrush again, and then at this point we need to add details. So first off if you are using a smooth brush be very careful about the edges since it is one sided ... the smooth brush will melt your model away in seconds ...  First in order to get the detail we want then we will need to subdivide to a level of detail that we will be using for our normal maps and texture maps. So before dividing you should turn the SMT button off for atleast the first 2 or 3 subdivides. After that point you can start sculpting ... using the dam standard brush cut in some folds and wrinkles, remember we will fit this to our model again and any time you alter a mesh it will need to be adjusted to your avatar shape ...  Also there are some great custom fabric brushes made by person called Selwy eaither serach for selwy brushes or well here is the link also for cut and paste, you may want to go through the tutorials ... you can never get to much reference, and education this person is a very good digital sculptor I have been using these brushes a few years in Zbrush.
http://www.selwy.com/2009/zbrush-clothes-tutorial/

Here  is a look at the top  / bra after doing a little quick sculpting for wrinkles folds ... even latex will fold and wrinkle as well cloths will have different folds and wrinkles depending on the type of cloth, whether it is a heavy canvas or denim or a light and delicate lace or silk or satin ....
 
  Now the material here in zbrush will only matter if you do a matcap bake with the zbrush matcap baker plugin. If not then only the texture color and paint will matter, and also the polys that are causing lines will be smoothed after we are in blender again. As well you can smooth normals before we export the normals maps that we will use. Our whole purpose in zbrush is that we have some great tools to polypaint with and as well texture and in the end the only version that blender will see of the model is the low poly version ... See the normal maps and texture maps are the ones that will have all the details, not the model itself. So for the next post I will finish up with my maps and then we will go back to Blender once again to finish this project.