8

Cloth Overview 557
Darts used to be a common part of women’s
everyday clothing, especially in blouses and
dresses. However, darts are not needed with loose
garments or stretchy clothing. Today, they are used
mostly in formal wear and tailored gar ments.
Clothing Design and Techniques
One way to create clothing is to lay out a pattern
and put it together with Garm ent Maker. Garment
Maker is a modifier that is used to make seams,
lay out cloth panels and define fabric densities.
YoucanuseGarmentMakertocreateseamsfor
the pattern either in a traditional, flat layout or in
avisual,easy-to-use3Dlayout.
Intherealworld,clothesaremadebycutting
outshapesfrompiecesofclothandsewingthem
together along seams with thread. Garment Maker
emulates this approach. First you must create a
pattern that will define the shapes of the panels.
Clothing patterns typically u se shapes that we
don’t encounter in everyday life. Those of us
who aren’t an experienced clothing designers
might have a hard t ime creating these shapes f rom
scratch. It’s often best to start out with a pattern
made by somebody else. Cloth includes a variety
of patterns for shirts, pants, jackets and so forth.
You can also buy sof tware that will generate these
patterns in DXF format.
One program that does this is PatternMaker,
available from w
ww.patternmaker.com.When
youwanttomovebeyondeditingthepatterns
included with Cloth, it’s often helpful to use such
applications to help create patterns and familiarize
yourself with the process .
Shirt pattern a nd shirt sewn together with Garment Ma k er
Modeling Clothing
Garment Maker is a useful tool for putting
together patterns and adjusting seams, but you
can also achieve good results by modeling with
the standard 3ds Max tools and using Cloth on
top of these meshes. You can create clothing with
polygons,patches,orNURBS.
Impor tant: Keep in mind that modeled clothing must
not have any overlapping vertices or interpenetrating
faces. This type of geometry can cause the simulation
to fail. Using Garment Maker; you will not run into this
problem. If you are careful in creating your mesh, then
this is an easy rule to follow.
Pros a n d Cons
When designing clothing, Garment Maker is
usually the best way to go. It lets you define
seams, seam strength, pleats, and other clothing
parameters that cannot be defined w ith clothing
modeled via other methods. Either methods lets
you define s eparate portions of your clothing with
different fabrics, but Garment Maker gives you
greater control over this. The advantage to using
modeled clothing is that it can s ometimes be a
faster setup with familiar methods and it’s a great
way to repurpose older clothing models you have
made in the past. Using polygon-modeled clothing
canresultinoverlyregularcreasesandfolds.
Garment Maker uses a Delaunay mesh, which
tends to avoid this problem. However, the irregular
triangulation can result in rendering artifacts
for low-resolution clothes, so it is advisable to