The Impossible Coat

I started experimenting with the Cloth Modifier, and got really excited with the realism I could simply achieve using it.

I quickly modelled the bombs as they would sit under the coat, my intension was to then drape fabric over the model, which would conform to the model and bombs underneath, creating a realistic coat.

 After my initial excitement over the potential of the cloth modifier, I quickly realised how difficult this task was going to be.

The cloth would hang too stiffly, or to loosely, it would intersect, bunch up etc. Many many problems. I managed to solve a whole bunch of these, but then just found more.

In the end I had to simply call it quits and use my least unsuccessful attempt.

The finale coat was made by modelling the majority of the coat using symmetry, I unwrapped the coat at this point. Then I moved this about so that it was not intersecting with any other meshes. I turbo smoothed this and then, used the cloth modifier to drop this only slightly onto the model. I may have relaxed parts of the mesh at this point to remove bunching. I then exported this mesh as the high poly coat. Then with edges selected double clicked on every other edge in order to select an entire loop, then by holding Ctrl and back space I deleted these loops with their corresponding vertexes. I reduced this high poly coat down to as fewer tries as a felt I could without losing the silhouette. The resulting mesh was then exported as the low poly coat. Using these two meshes I then created a normal map, via backing in X-Normal.

 It was during this tri reduction process that I mad the worst mistake of this project. This process would have created N-Gons, I should have gone back into the Low poly geometry and altered the mesh to remove these at this point.  Stupidly I totally missed this step in my process, so this was not done. I then dived head long into texturing and didn’t realise that I had forgotten to do this until after finale hand in.