Lace Shirt

[cathereinne]

I've been thinking a lot about doing lacey clothing and here's my first try at it:
http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m6133axKEI1r79vkto1_500.jpg

http://i992.photobucket.com/albums/af50/growingcurious/TS2/laceyshirt2.jpg

http://i992.photobucket.com/albums/af50/growingcurious/TS2/laceyshirt1.jpg

I just needed some tips to improve it. I'll be thankful for it :)

[ac220]

Hi, and welcome :) Very cool concept and a very good start.

You should really post some pics of it from the front and sides, - even though the lacy part is the most "interesting," it's the shirt as a whole that you're creating. This is especially true for female clothes, since you need to do more shading in the breast area than you do with males.

Now, just seeing it from the back, I'd say non-lacy parts do look flood-filled and not like cloth at all. There are several ways to remedy that. Use some Maxis recolour as a guide to what the shading should be like. This kind of shirt would be probably made of smooth, silky fabric, so, you need rather aggressive, hard highlights. ADD: It would probably be also rather tight, so, there's little or no need for any visible folds and shadows, except around the breasts, of course. ADD2: Come to think of it, which mesh do you use as a base? It looks as if whatever you're using was designed for baggy clothes, not tight-fitting shirts, but I might be mistaken here, not seeing it from all angles and all that.

(There are numerous tutorials on this site on how to make passable highlights and shadows easily.)

Some kind of a visible seam between lace and fabric is probably a good idea as well, plus some way to reinforce lace at the top (real one would unravel very fast, I suspect, if it was just left like that.)

[cathereinne]

Thank you for the feedback :)
I've started trying to shade this thing but I have no clue where the shades must go to, so I am giving up this project and I'll find a mesh with a recolor that has more guides for me

[ac220]

Ok.. This method has its limits, but it should work well for your design.

Find a plain, light recolour of your mesh. Import this texture as a layer on top of your texture. Convert this layer to greyscale. Set blendmode to "multiply" and play with layer opacity a bit. Instant pro-like shading! :D

The downside is that this way you transfer everything, seams, designs, etc. to your texture (so it's important for the recolour to be plain.)

If you're more adventurous, you can try smudges, blurs and clones on this "shading" layer to erase things you don't like and add something you'd like to be there, or add another layer with different blendmode, and eventually you'd get a hang of it and would be able to make good shading from scratch. Looking at RL cloth and noticing how it responds to the light is important too. Basically, the smoother something is, the more bright and well-defined highlights you'd want. Things like fur are a bit trickier, since a lot is going on there, you see some strand from the side, as if they were hair and some straight-on, which creates a very distinctive pattern of highlights.

Shadows are somewhat simpler, looking at maxis textures should give you an idea of just how dark and how soft they ought to be to look good, and you can get them by just drawing a streak of black and then blurring or smudging it until it looks just like you want it to.

Both learning to figure out what kind of shading you want and learning to achieve the effect with your paint program takes time, but it's not some mystic art, it's learnable, and in fact rather easy once you're used to it. Also, any visual arts book (drawing, painting, photography, 3D) worth its price (or even better, formal instruction) would explain how to look at and interpret light, shadows and colours. Although terminology is different in each area, it's really one and the same underlying skill they're training. Yes, photographers do it by phisycally moving around their flashes, lights and umbrellas, 3D artists affect this indirectly by adjusting shaders, and painters just paint what they see, but the principle is the same.