1.) The very first step is to open Modeler and create a box with little to no
thickness. I suggest you give no thickness to the box so that when it comes time to shape
the piece of cloth you will suffer less.
2.) The next step is to open the Surface Editor and adjust the settings to achieve the look of cloth. You will need to adjust Glossiness to 40%. If Glossiness is not highlighted you can change Specularity to 1% in order to adjust it. Then change Specularity to -10%. Diffuse should be between 90 and 75%. The last part is to make sure Smoothing is selected and if you wanted to save yourself a headache also select Double Sided. Now you have a plain piece of cloth.
3.) To liven things up you can change the color of the cloth by double-clicking the hue square. Also if you want it to look even more realistic you can apply a cloth texture. Here is a good site for cloth textures.
4.) Now it is time to shape the piece of cloth into the shape you want. A great way
to do this is to create another layer in your object file. This layer will contain a model
such as the character you are making the clothes for or a stand in. I used the skeleton
character within Lightwave.
5.) Make sure that your character is the correct size. I sized my skeleton down to 6 ft. tall. The reason for is that this made sure all the cloth items fit him just right and most importantly the final piece fit into the scene correctly.
6.) The tools that are the best for manipulating a piece of cloth you create are the
Magnet, Drag, DragNet, and Knife. The Magnet Tool will manipulate the piece of cloth like
this:
The Drag Tool will manipulate the piece of cloth like this:
The Bend Tool will manipulate the piece of cloth like this:
The Knife tool is used for cutting polygons whenmerging the two ends of
the cloth together if you want the cloth to have a pieced look like this:
7.) Then all that remains is to take your object into Layout and render the
cloth to see how you like it. In layout you can still manipulate the Diffuse, just make sure
if you change the texture or anything else you save the Object. Also an important part is
to have Ray Trace Shadows selected within your Rendering Options.
If you have any parts of the cloth that appear black you may have a coplanar polygon. A coplanar polygon is when a polygon has been manipulated in such a way that it now has two surface normals. To get rid of this problem you can go back into Modeler and by going into the Numerics menu and select Statistics you can select just these polygons and by hitting capital T you will Triple the polygon. It slices the polygon into two triangles, thus getting rid of this problem.
8.) The final step is to just go for it and experiment. Good luck and have fun!
