Realistic sofa cushions with Max?

[wannabeartist]

Hi,

 

Could someone share a good workflow for making realistic looking sofa cushions?

 

I'm having a hard time making the little wrinkles on the seams. I've been trying to achieve this by sculpting with the new freeform tools, but I'm not really getting a natural looking result.

 

What's the best way to do it? Bump maps? Actually using Cloth to wrap the cushion? Any tips and experiences appreciated

 

Thanks!

[wannabeartist]

I went and tried to do this with the Cloth modifier.

 

I kind of like the (noisy) edges here, but the corners are sticking out and that was not the plan. Any tips, using cloth or not still very welcome

[carlotristan3d]

checkout fran's surreal structures blog. she has awesome cushion tutorial.

[wannabeartist]

Do you mean the Todd Daniele's tutorial she has linked on her blog? It's alright, that one I have seen before.

 

I've been reading her great tutorials on cloth just this week, but I cannot find a specific tutorial for cushions (other than the mentioned). I wish there were one!

 

I've been trying to figure a decent way to do this all day and I kind of landed to the same conclusion as many times before - I should learn Zbrush

 

But I'm sure there are ways to do this by just using Max, if you are skilled enough.

[Fran]

Hi Vasco,

 

What type of object did you start with for your cloth simulation? If it was a Box primative, try the Chamferbox. That might help with the pointy corners. I had planned to do a pillow tutorial with cloth simulation, but haven't gotten to it yet. The Todd Daniele tutorial is what I use to create pillow blanks.

[wannabeartist]

Hi Fran!

 

The filling was a box with rounded corners, but I believe the problem was the shape of my patterns - they were just sharp rectangles.

 

I took a look at a real foot rest (this is supposed to be the top piece of a foot rest) and realized, that the top piece of cloth is rounded. So I redid the patterns by dividing the seam segments in 3 parts and pushing in the corner vertices of the top and the bottom piece.

 

For the simulation I used an even more rounded box. I used a variation of Scott Onstott's technique which I saw on the video you had linked in your great towel tutorial (thanks!) - I first made the filling a little smaller than the cloth and then scaled it up bigger than the cloth and animated the scaling over 100 frames.

 

I picked my favorite from frame 47 - it's pretty close to what I was looking for.

 

Now, this was supposed to be the top "seat" of a foot rest and for the actual sitting cushions and back cushions a little more work must be done. Especially this lacks those long stretchy wrinkles you see in real sofas and the seams need a little more work too, but that might actually be more of a texturing job.

[pjoriordan]

Hi wannabeartist,

 

I too have have been trying to find a solution for producing wrinkles in cushions/sofas. By any chance have you found a suitable solution? I too was thinking of introducing Zbrush into the pipeline but I am not willing to purchase it or a tablet as of yet.

 

Cloth sim came close but just a little more detail would be nice.

 

Anyone got any ideas?

[wannabeartist]

Hi,

 

Are you working with Max 2010 or 2011?

 

If you are, you could try the Graphite modeling tools (Freeform) to get some more wrinkles - it's kind of like ZBrush, but of course much simpler.

 

I haven't really done much anything cloth related after the sofa, so I have no new information on this. Still consider ZBrush myself, but it's too much money to invest right now.

[pjoriordan]

I work with max 2009. Would vray displacement mod provide a possible solution. I'm going to work on and find a result for this problem. Would it be ok if I post my results here in this thread?

[Thablanch]

A little tutorial I did for my students... No sound, but going slow enough for people to follow. You can also click the HD toggle, to be able to see something.

 

[wannabeartist]

I work with max 2009. Would vray displacement mod provide a possible solution. I'm going to work on and find a result for this problem. Would it be ok if I post my results here in this thread?

 

Go ahead, I'd love to see what you did.

[pjoriordan]

Aww it stop after 7min and I was so caught up in what you were demonstrating. Is there more to this? If not, there is quite a nice flow to the modeling. I thank you for sharing.

[pjoriordan]

Ok I came up with a solution, I've used vray displacement mod. I just couldn't get the result I was looking for with cloth. I've attached the uv displacement map, the texture I used for the wrinkles and a resulting image. The issue I now face is a hard edge I get from displacing the UV map (see cropped image). Now I'm under the impression if a map is 50% grey it won't displace. I know colour mapping might have an effect on this. I'm using LWF 2.2 as my colour mapping solution and I've imported the above map with overriding gamma to 2.2. Does anyone know if vray will displace with a value of 127 photoshop's 50%. I've read in Francesco Legrenz "VRay - THE COMPLETE GUIDE", Vray sees 50% as 128. Is this the cause of my hard edge? Any advice and recommendation will be well appreciated.

Edited September 13, 2010 by pjoriordan

[Thablanch]

PJ.. is displacement is a little overkill for this.. You can get away with bump for this "thickness" of wrinkles. Just a question...

 

Your hard edge is caused by surfaces wanting to displace in different directions.

[Nic H]

are you using 3d displacement?

i reckon a normal map would do just as well at this distance

would help if your red colour wasnt self illuminated as well - far too bright, i assume its a straight RGB value>?

[Roodogg]

I have been trying it out this way also. Though the simulation works, I just can't ignore the fact that the tris that garment maker uses create a very messy final product! And applying a smoothing mod on top just doesn't work. I would like to know if there's a way to create seams with quads.