A winter(ish) sweater

The last week of this year has come and gone and brought me... a nice sweater? Um, thanks, I guess.

Even though it isn't a masterpiece cherry on top of a productive year, I still think it is serviceable. I didn't want to do anything too crazy or too simplistic, and I think this design has managed to hit the sweet spot.

The modelling phase went far better then expected, considering I extruded everything from a circle that had been stepped on. When I reached the arm area, I selected a couple of vertices and made them circular with the help of LoopTools (I do hope that my favourite add-ons get their 2.8 revamp soon). With the flappy bits made, I just topped it off with a loop around the neck and I was ready for a bit of sculpting.

But not too much. After all, my reference doesn't have any crazy folds either. I knew I had to focus mainly on UV unwrapping this time. I wanted to simulate a real woven material, with, you know, see-through holes (I'm going to wildly assume here that you've seen a knitted sweater before). I knew I would be able to do that in Painter with an opacity map (where black stands for transparent bits and white for opaque ones). But I wasn't sure whether it would work with a mesh that has thickness, because the front and back piece of the same area would end up on different parts of the UV space.

So I thought I'd do something clever—and silly—at the same time. I carefully UV-unwrapped the sweater before I applied the Solidify modifier. This effectively gave me two sets of UVs, one for the outside, and one for the inside, with only half of the work. And then the fun began. I manually aligned every front-and-back face. Vertex by vertex. Thank god for automatic vertex snapping, I don't know what I'd have done without it. The final map looks like this:

It was almost solid blue before I sculpted on it, but it didn't get too distorted. The only downside of this approach is that I can't re-unwrap the sweater without killing myself first. No, seriously, I would NOT want to do this again.

Luckily for me, the layout worked perfectly in Painter (which is a first, I think). I found a couple of materials that supported opacity and I set to work. The hems and the main body were easy enough, but the front lace... thing... was a bit more challenging. I ended up manually painting the mask on the front piece and I ditched the shoulder lace. It doesn't look super appealing, but it works better than I had expected.

If I encountered any problems, they were with the opacity and how it was displayed in Painter's viewport vs. Iray. Sometimes I could see through parts of the mesh I was not supposed to, at other times the front lace seemingly disappeared in the viewport... yeah, transparency can be fun, sometimes.

I'm not going to stretch this post too much further, but I have a couple more things I wanted to share. First, I'm going to participate in SculptJanuary, so you can expect the next 5 posts to be made up of mostly images (I expect I'll be too tired to give them any sort of extended commentary). Second, I'd like to create demo reels for 2017 and 2018 and share them on my YouTube channel. I'll probably upload them before next Sunday, but I'll put the direct links in the next post anyway. Oh, and third, if you like this sweater, you can download it on Sketchfab below:

And that will be all from me this year, see you in the next one!