Legendary Jacket Item - Scultping

In order to achieve the base of the jacket, I decided to experiment with a new softwear: Marvelous Designer. I retopped and brought in my mannequin in order to make sure that the jacket fits it afterwards. 

For the mannequin, I didn't dwell on deformation loops or avoiding triangles at any cost, as I knew it wouldn't move in the context of a hypothetical game, and half of it would be covered by the jacket anyway. 

After bringing it into Marvelous Designer as an avatar, I had to set the bounding volumes and arrangement points as the program hadn't managed to do it on my mesh. Thankfully, it didn't take a long time, and the arrangement points were helpful later on, when arranging the material on the mannequin.

 

I used examples of military jacket patterns I had researched and added some of my own ideas too in order to get the shapes in my concept drawing. I first made a basic blowse pattern then started to shape it to my liking. I used "darts", triangular cuts made into the material in order to make the jacket more fitted and give it the stiff, triangular shape.

After getting the basic shape, I just adjusted some of the shapes to make sure it fit the way I wanted it too and that I could get the folds I was looking for. I then quadrangulated it and sent it to Zbrush. Unfortunately, I hadn't set the particle distance properly, so the topology was too low and the level of detail on the folds was lost. I couldn't figure this out in that moment, so you'll see I had to sculpt some of the detail back in Zbrush, though the indication of fold shapes was still helpful. 

I welded together the pannels that made up the jacket using Weld Points and then regained some of the seam indents using ZModeler. On this occasion, I got the chance to practice ZModeler, which I had been reticent using until now. 

I then used the base to build up my jacket and made all the metal bits and details in Zbrush. Since they were simple shapes, it didn't take long, though I spent time making sure they look polished enough, as they are hard surface. As for surface details, I kept the damage low on the military jacket, since it's supposed to look clean and distinguished compared to the other one. I made the medals in 3ds Max and then polished them in Zbrush.

At first, there was no trim around the round piece on the chest of the jacket, but after getting some feedback, I decided to add it as a decorative piece in order to mask the sharp transition between the chest piece and the jacket surface. I also added more folds and inflated the edges of the panels a bit in order to give the impression of how the pieces on a real military jacket join together in the shoulder seam area. 

For the biker jacket skin I simply modified the shape of the metallic shoulder pads in order to give them a sharper more aggressive look, and added spikes on top, as well as more surface wear and damage on the metal. 

The rest of the details I will add in Substance Painter, in order to hopefully keep a non-destructive workflow and be able to change things on the way without spending too much time going back.