3D Clothing Modeling Questions

[emmyjemmyjammy]

So I'm nearing the end of the modeling stage for an outfit I'm making, I'm marking seams for my UV's. However I have a few questions based on my observations of looking at models from the game and other games.

 

1. I notice that for things like clothes and hair there are sometimes two sets of vertices in the same location as each other but with opposite normals. Is this to account for backface culling so that if the player sees the interior of say a skirt or hair that it isn't transparent on the inside? Do I need to implement this myself in my own models by duplicating my geometry and flipping the normals?

 

2. Many skirts have little "modesty panels" where the legs end, I'm guessing because it makes skinning easier so you can delete the skin mesh for the hips and avoid clipping, but when I try to make one that attaches directly to the mesh it messes up normals of the outside of the skirt. What's the best way to make these so that I can avoid clipping?

 

3. In the places where an object in the mesh ends like a sleeve cuff or shirt hem I notice that it's common practice to have a few faces covering the hole, is it alright to merge the vertices at the center or do I just move all of them to the same spot like artists seem to in cases like my first question?

 

Sorry for the several questions, I didn't want to flood the forum by making multiple threads. If anyone has any insight I'd really appreciate it!

[madmongo]

Keep in mind that I do not consider myself to be much of a 3d modeler. But here's my take on it, for what it's worth.

 

1. I have never bothered to do this. If you can see something like the inside of a skirt, I just make that mesh double-sided.

 

2. I think the "modesty panels" are more for modesty than to avoid clipping. You can easily avoid clipping by making the skirt slightly larger.

 

Anyway, the easiest way to make "modesty panel" sorts of things is to extrude an interior to the skirt, which I am probably not explaining very well. But imagine you are making your skirt kinda like a cylinder, so you make it with both an interior and an exterior, like this:

 

https://i.ytimg.com/vi/2mdqxvGCPFA/maxresdefault.jpg

 

Now when you make your modesty panels, they will be attached to the mesh's interior wall and you won't affect the normals (or anything else) on the mesh's exterior wall.

 

3. It's perfectly fine to just merge all of the vertices at the center. That's what I always do.

[emmyjemmyjammy]

Thank you so much ! Really appreciate it. This is good stuff to know for all my 3D work not just modding!