Guide to Adding Clothing in Blender

Okay, so you want to add pants and a shirt to your character in Blender. I'm going to show you how to do that step by step today. So you can see this is pretty much what we're going to be doing. And this is due to a very big amount of success I've had on a video I posted four days ago about cloth sewing that has almost 60,000 views now. And I've had a lot of questions. And people have been asking me, how do I add pants and a shirt to my character? How do I stop the pants from sliding off? And how do you add it to an animated character? That's been the number one question. So this is what I'm gonna be showing you guys how to do today. We're gonna actually be importing a character. If you don't have one, I'm gonna quickly show you how to set it up in Blender, how we're gonna quickly add a very quick animation to it, and then how to add the pants and the shirt. In this case, it's like a sports style kind of apparel. How to add it, and you can see it's a little bit slow here, but if I turn off the subdivision surface modifier, this is pretty much it. And this guy, and another more advanced example. I'm going to be making them available on my Patreon for the $3 tier or higher. So go ahead, check out the link for that in the description below. But if you're not on Patreon, don't worry. I'm going to be showing you where to download this free model on the internet. Don't need an account. And then we're going to just quickly animate it and add the clothing. You can see this looks absolutely amazing. And I'm going to be doing it step by step. So hit like and subscribe. And let's get into this really awesome tutorial. I hope you guys learn something and enjoy it. Okay, so first of all, those of you who do not have a model to work with, you're going to go into the description below. There's going to be a link to download this guy over here. So when you open up the link, it's going to come to this. It's going to be free. You don't have to create an account. you're going to come here and click on download. You're then going to click here, it's going to download this file. And once it's done downloading, you are going to come to your downloads folder and you're just going to extract that. So you're just going to go and use whatever extraction software you use. So I'm just going to extract the file here. And here you have this blend file. So just take that blend file and drag it onto your desktop wherever you can access it. So in my case, I'm putting it on my desktop. And then I'm just going to open up a fresh scene in Blender. And I have reasons for doing this. It's just so we get a fresh workspace. And we're just going to hit A and then X and just delete all of these objects in our scene. We're going to go to File and Append. And let's just go to our desktop or wherever. In this case, I put mine on my desktop. I'm just going to click on that blend file. Go to Object. And I'm just going to grab all of these objects here and go Append. So here we have this guy now in a fresh scene. There's a reason I'm doing it because if you just open up that blend file that you downloaded, it's just it doesn't have the workspace quite right. So this is an easy fresh way of solving that problem. So what we're going to do is just going to select the character over here by clicking on it. Holding in shift we're going to select the armature here. So you have both of these items selected. Then you're going to go Ctrl I or Command I to inverse the selection. You're going to hit X and you're going to delete. Then what we're going to do is we're going to select the armature over here, and we're going to hit 1 to go to our front orthographic view. Come over here to your timeline, and we're going to come to the end frame value and make it 130 and hit Enter. We've got 140 frames to work with. Then we're going to come here, just drag this up over here. Make sure you're on frame 1, and on frame 1 of this armature selected, we're going to go into our pose mode over here. Just go to pose mode, and we're quite simply just going to give this guy a T pose. It's going to make things a bit easier. Just grab the arm. Over here on the right, this arm bone, and then go R to rotate it out. And then just grab this guy here and rotate it out a bit as well. Just like that. And let's just then hit A to select all these bones. And we're going to go I. And just insert a location and a rotation keyframe here. And this has come to frame 30. And the reason we're going to have this T-pose just for a few frames is because when we initially modeled this cloth around the T-pose, we needed to kind of snap to or simulate. and collide with the body before we can have it animate. So always have about 30 frames or so should work okay. So on frame 30 with all these bones selected, we're going to go I again and insert a location and rotation keyframe. So now we're going to have this hold here, which we're going to need in a T pose. And then we're going to simply come to frame 70 or 80. So let's just make it frame 75 in this case. So in frame 75, Just do any kind of animation you want and this is just for demonstration purposes, so nothing fancy. I'm just going to grab this foot bone down here at the back and just move it up like this. Go to the front orthographic view and then just grab the hip, just move it over a little bit so it kind of looks like he's doing something. Just like this. It doesn't have to be fancy, just maybe something like that. And grab the chest here maybe, rotate it out a bit. And maybe even rotate the head a little bit up. So just get something that you think looks cool. So just to test out the cloth, so I'm going to maybe bring this arm up a little bit more. Then with that done, I'm going to hit A. I might just rotate the hip a little bit. Okay, so hit A to select all of these bones. 75 we're gonna go I and when you insert a location and rotation keyframe and then we're just going to simply come to frame 120 and we're going to type in here this is hit f3 on a keyboard I was going to type in Clear Pose Transform. So if you just type in Clear Pose, and you click on Clear Pose Transforms, it'll set everything back. Then we're gonna go I and insert a location and rotation keyframe. So this is just a little example animation. So if we go to frame one and we just hit the space bar, you're gonna see we have this example little animation here. So it's not meant to be a final animation or anything fancy. It's just to demonstrate how you can add the cloth that we're about to do, the sewing. So as As far as this character goes here, I'm also going to just tab into edit mode of it. So just grab the character, go into edit mode, and just quickly enable proportional editing. And we're just going to select this vertice here at the front, or vertex, and just move it back a little bit like this, and just correcting a few things over here. Might just grab the sky, bring that in a little bit. And X mirror should be turned on, so it should happen on both sides. And I'm just fixing some of these things up a little bit on the model. And we don't want too much pointiness here. Just something like this. Doesn't have to be too fancy. Maybe just grab a vertex at the back here and just bring it in a little bit. Just like this. And then let's just also give this guy a subdivision surface modifier. So give it a subsurface modifier and get rid of the original one that I just rid of there and the reason we need this to have a nice smooth surface is because when we go over to our physics tab so our physics tab over here we want to give this mesh a collision so click on the collision here we can now see it has collision and the reason we want to be nice and smooth so when our cloth um interacts with the surface it's not going to be a rough rigid surface so the smoother this is the nicer our um our simulation is going to be for our cloth sewing so In this case, I've just given this guy a subdivision surface modifier, and on top of that afterwards, we gave it a collision. So you should see in your modifiers stack, an armature, a subsurf modifier, and then a collision. And once you've done that, this guy is now ready to go. So we can get into making our cloth now, and I'm going to show you how to make pants and then a shirt, and it's just going to be really fun. Okay, so first of all, let's just organize our workspace a little bit. So I'm just going to select the armature by clicking on it, and let's just hit. M, the M key, and we're going to go New Collection. And this is called as Rig, and go OK. Click on OK, and you can come over here to your Scene Collections. Just click on the little tick box here, and that'll hide that rig, but it is still very much active. You can also just hover over this, just drag it down. This is a little bit more real estate here to work with. And once we have an organized scene, we can go into our front orthographic view. And I'm going to go Shift-A, go to Mesh Options, and just add in a plane. With this plane selected, we're going to tab into edit mode. With all of these vertices selected, we're going to go R, X, 9, 0, and we're going to hit enter. If you have proportional editing enabled, just disable it. And then what we're going to do is just give this guy a mirror modifier. And then go A to select all of this, and go G, X, and just move it over to the side. Enable clipping, and then go G, X, and just merge them together like this. So just something like that should be fine. So now if you go G and you move it, you see they're merged together. So let's just tap out of edit mode quickly. Go G, Z and bring this guy up to about the groin area here. And then we're going to tap back into edit mode. And we're working in and out of edit mode so we can preserve this little origin point here. So we kind of don't want it to be sitting at the bottom here. So in edit mode, with all of this selected, we're going to go G, Y. And we're just going to move these four vertices forward like this. And I'm going to show you how to very quickly turn this into some pants. So what we're going to do is we're going to select this bottom vertex first. I'm going to go G and just move it up just below the groin over here. And you can go Z and go into wireframe if that helps. Select this vertex here and go G and move it over here. And then I'm going to grab this vertex here and bring it in over here. And then bring this one down a little bit. So just something like this. And if it makes things a little bit easier, you can also grab your timeline here and drag it to frame 0, where our character is in the T pose, so we don't get the arms here on the side. It could make things a little bit easier. Okay, so with that done, what we're going to do is with our mouse over here, our mouse cursor over here, we're going to go Control R, and you should see this yellow line appearing. So just double click, and that's going to add in a loop. With that loop selected, go double G, and it's going to slide it over. So we're sliding it over, and then we're going to grab this vertex here, and holding and Shift, we're going to select this vertex here, and we're simply going to go E and extrude these guys down. And we want our pants to be about down here. Now obviously, this is up to you. It's your character. But if you want really long... Saggy pants, you could do that, but I'm just going to go something like basketball pants, almost, or sport pants. And what we're going to do now is grab this vertex, just bring it out a little bit more. And we do want to think about the width of this. And even though these pants look a lot wider than the character, we want to give it a little bit of extra girth or curvature or a bit more volume because you've got to account for it wrapping around this surface here. So something like this or even a little bit more extended. is okay. You don't have to worry about it. So now that we have these pants roughly done, what we're going to do is we're going to add some geometry. So with our mouse cursor over here, go control R or command R if you're a Mac user, and just roll your middle mouse button to add in some loops and about this many, double click. And do the same thing up here, control R, and then roll in some loops, about this many, double click. And then you can come over here at the top, control R, see the yellow line. appearing roll your middle mouse button and add in some of these so we want these to love roughly look like a square grid we don't want any faces that are like almost like a rectangle like this is more square you can keep them the nicer this is gonna work so just keep that in mind and I like to add materials earlier on especially so I can see the color difference between this mesh and the mesh it's working on so I'm just gonna go down to the materials tab just click on the new here this is called this clock Cloth 1 and simply go down to the viewport display and just make it darker and increase something like the roughness. I just like the look of that in the viewport display personally. Create another one. Just click on the little plus, go new. Okay, you don't have to assign it, but just call this Cloth 2 and I'm just going to make this one red or something in the viewport display and increase the roughness. So now in the front view, what I'm going to do. is shift alt click on this loop of vertices up here and go control plus to grow it twice and then i'm going to just go and just assign that cloth to material and then what i'm going to do is i'm going to go shift alt and click on this top row vertices and go e z and just extrude it up once more to about here and then i'm going to go to my face select and I'm going to go click on here to select a face and holding in shift and alt or shift and control, click on this face here and that's going to select everything in between. Then we're going to go X, but we're not going to delete faces, we're only going to go only faces. And essentially that's just going to leave these edges in for us. Now you could do it like this if you wanted to, and then just duplicate over to the other side, but you could run into some issues where it extrudes these edges as well. So I would recommend not doing it this way, though you could, it'll just be a bit harder. go um ctrl z or command z to undo that okay but you've got to remember that this later on is going to be um we're going to delete these over here but for now what we're going to do is do the same thing down here. So we're just going to go Shift-Alt, click on these, Shift and Alt, you can click on these faces here, and they'll just loop select these faces, and then we're going to assign a Cloth2 material, and eventually we're going to be deleting these faces in between here, leaving the edges. But for now, these are our pants. So what we're going to do is we're going to hit A to select all of this geometry, and once you're happy with these pants, you can go E to extrude them, and we're going to extrude back to about here, right? Once you've done that, you can click on this face here, or you can just hit the C tool, and it's gonna bring up the C select tool, and you can just select these faces at the top and go X and just delete those faces. You can also hit the C tool down here and just select these bottom faces and go X and delete these faces. And we don't need any faces in here because these are the opening areas of the pants. Obviously, we don't need them there. But what we need to do now is we need to click on this face here, holding in Shift and Alt, just a quick way. just click on the face up here or shift and control and it's just select everything in between and once again you can also hit c and just bring up the c select tool and select everything in between so totally up to you how you want to do that and then what we're going to do is go to our object data properties here so click on it go to the vertex groups and we're going to go plus and we're going to go and assign these vertices to this group here right and let's just call this sewing and hit OK or Enter. And if we now hit AA to deselect all of this and we go Select, we should see all of these are selected in that group, which is what we want. And then we're also going to go Control and shift and just click inside of here and then click over here that's just going to select everything in between and then we're going to go with that group sewing group selected we're going to go assign and a good way to test this once again deselect everything and with this selected we can go select and it'll show you what is in that group what we also need to do now is with all of these Faces selected out here and in the groin area. We need to go X and we're going to go only faces So that's going to only delete the faces and leave the edges Which is exactly what we want and then we're going to add this little detail that I told you about so going Shift and alt when I click on here to select all of these faces shift and alt click on here and then in here as well So select all of these and shift alt click here. It's just like all of these, right? And then what you're going to do is you're going to go X and you can go only faces. But before you do that, also just make sure to assign with all of those faces selected. Then go X and just delete only faces. So now... go to your vertex select option and with the sewing group we're going to go select and you should see all of these vertices in the sides and in the inside here selected and these guys here that have to kind of snap together where we have these different bits down the bottom and these different bits at the top but nothing in between that and nothing at the top here and nothing at the bottom sleeve area here should be selected and what's going to happen is where these vertices vertices are in this group, if there's an edge between them, that's kind of where they're gonna snap together, where that edge is, right? That's why we don't want any of these guys added to this group, like the inside ones here. So just so you guys understand what's going on, and you know what the issues are if they come up. So let's tab out of edit mode, and what we're gonna do next is add a cloth simulation to this, and make it look really cool. Okay, so with the pants selected, what we need to do is go over to our physics tab down here, so click on the physics tab. Now let's give this guy a cloth simulation or cloth modifier. And first of all, just under the cloth settings here at the very top, we're going to take the quality steps, just bump it up to eight. If you have some issues, you can bump it up to 10, 11, if you want some better quality. But I find eight works fine for this sort of thing. Then simply just you can drop down this physics properties or just close it. We don't need that. We're just going to simply go down to the shape for now and just enable sewing. So that's obviously what this is about, cloth sewing. So enable that. We're going to get back to these two. settings here in a second, but then we also want to make sure the cloth can actually interact with itself. That's very important. So let's go to the collisions here. First of all, just set the quality here to 8 as well. And we're just going to come down to the self collision option here and enable that. Now as far as this simulation goes, if we just quickly play it, right, if you hit the space bar on your own frame 1, you play it, you're gonna see it's gonna run, but you're gonna have some issues that we need to deal with and that is that the pants are gonna slide off. So if you remember earlier, when we just set this guy up, in our modifiers here, we added a collision, right? You can see here, we have the armature, the subdivision surface, and the collision that we added over here. So just come over to the physics setting, and we're gonna, with this guy selected, under the collision settings here, and we just wanna come down to the friction and make that really high. So I'm gonna mine something like 50. You can experiment with that, but 40, 50 should do the job. Then you can go to Object, just select the pants as well, and just go to the Object and just enable Shade Smooth. I just like the way that looks a little bit better. But you can see now if we go back to frame one and we hit the spacebar, it's not going to slide off. So that looks a lot better now. And once we have pants that are not falling off here, we can get on to the rest of the thing. But you can see just right up front, just with those few settings like this, this actually looks pretty good. But some people have said that they get kind of like a big gap between the simulation and the object that they're working with. So if some things you want to try is make sure everything that you have, that including the cloth and the thing that it's simulating on, are applied. So if you ever scale it and Object mode just go control a and make sure to apply to scale. That's also very important What you also want to do is with the character here selected is under the the collision settings You want to come to this thick thickness outer and you want to make it a bit smaller so you can make it point zero zero One for example, and that's just gonna close the gaps in between here as well And I might make this one point zero zero one on the inner value And you can also grab the cloth itself and under the collision settings you can come here to the distance and you can also decrease this number here if you're not happy with that gap. So making them all really small, turn back to frame one and then hitting the spacebar just to play it. And you can see this is too much so 0.01 might be better. Under the distance, back to frame one, hit spacebar. So just mess around with that, you guys kind of have an idea of what's going on there. But what we also want to do is under the self collision, if we have too many of these gaps that aren't closing, we want to come to the self collision distance here, we want to decrease that. So I'm going to make mine 0.01, and then give that a shot, go to frame one, hit the space bar, and just till you get something that you like. But for now, I'm kind of happy with these. settings over here, but let's get back to our actual sewing. So let's go back up to the shape, and under the shape we're gonna go to the sewing, and we're gonna go to the max sewing force, and obviously as the name suggests, the more it increases, the more it's gonna kind of like, pull together, so if I make this like 0.1 for example, and then go back to frame one, hit the space bar, it's just not enough, so what we're gonna do, is we're gonna take this max sewing force and maybe, gradually just increase it. So let's give 5 a shot. And 5 is okay, but you can see it's still not quite where we want it. So let's just maybe even try something like 12. And this is where you can just gradually go up and see what works for you. So 12 seems to be okay. Maybe just bump it up. In my case, I'll probably go up to 15. And then what we can do is we can also come over to the Oops, sorry, I accidentally made the friction over here 15. So just go over to the distance under the sewing here and make that 15. And let's see what's happening there. Okay, so that looks okay. And then also here the shrinking factor, we can make that something like 0.1 or 0.2, but anything more than that usually it crumbles up. So let's just give that a shot. Okay, so what I'm going to do is I'm just going to make the shrinking factor 0.05 and then I'm going to make this max sewing force 21 and I'm going to give that a shot. So this is just one of those things you have to mess around with. until you get something that you like. But in this case, these settings over here seem to work quite well. Now what we're going to do as well with these pants, while we have them selected, is we're going to go to our Modifiers stack. Just minimize this mirror and minimize this cloth. And then we're going to go and give it give this guy a subdivision surface modifier. And then on top of that, we're gonna add a solidify modifier just to give this a little bit of thickness. And that just makes it look really cool. And this looks really awesome. You can see we have some nice wrinkles in here and it just looks like some really nice pants that I'm quite happy with. So I'm gonna quickly show you how we can cache this out. And actually maybe not cache it out. I think next we'll actually just get started with the shirt. And And the shirt is going to be attached to this, so we don't really have to change much more of the settings. It should be okay. But after that, I'm going to show you how to cache it out with the animation. Okay, so I've already covered a shirt, like I said, in one of my earlier videos. But I'm going to cover it in this as well, show you how to add it to this. So let's just grab the pants here, tab into edit mode. And I'm on about somewhere between frame 0 and frame 10, so that's fine. Just so we get the pose where we want it to be. So I'm going to tab into edit mode with these pants selected. And just any vertex on here selected just hit L or Ctrl L and that's going to select everything. And you can just hit H to hide it. Okay so what we're going to do next is model the shirt. So I'm going to go while we're in edit mode now and do keep in mind we are inside of edit mode. So we're going to go Shift A. in edit mode, we're going to add a plane. Then we're going to go RX 9-0, hit enter. Then we're going to go G, Z, and just move this guy up here. And in our modifiers stack, we just want to disable the subdivision surface modifier and the solidify modifier. Then go into your right orthographic view, and then go G, and just move this guy forward. Go into your front orthographic view, and then just go G and move it over to the side, just so they snap together, and then bring it back in. Right? So just something like that. And for now I'm just going to go to my materials tab and make this cloth too. Just so I can see it a little bit better, which makes things easier. And the shirt is even easier than the pants. So all we're going to do is grab these two vertices at the bottom and maybe bring them down a bit to about here. And then you're going to grab this vertex here, bring it down just under the arm, bring this guy down to about here. Ctrl-R, double-click, double-G to slide in an edge loop here. And then you're going to grab these two vertices and go E to extrude them up. Then R to rotate them. And then Ctrl R once again in here to add a cut. Click on these two vertices here and go E to shoot them up to here. Grab this guy over here and just bring it down. like that. So already we're very quickly making a shirt as you can see here. And we're going to come over here, control R, just add in two cuts and control R, just add in one over here. And we simply want all of these to be roughly looking like squares. Then we're going to hit A to select everything, right click and we're going to go subdivide. And then we're going to bump this up to about four. Should be okay. So we have now four level of subdivision there. Just bring this down. Just deselect everything. everything, and now we have a shirt ready to go. But what we can also do, just to smooth things out a bit, is we can go to our proportional Click on that and in your front view you select this corner vertex here. Go G and just move it out. You can roll your middle mouse wheel as you're going. So just move it out to here like that. It doesn't really matter. You can also hit A to select all of this and go to your Smooth tool. and just kind of smooth things out a little bit but you don't have to go too crazy so just go back up here okay so now we have our shirt quite simple what we're going to do is go to our face select option here and with all these faces selected we're going to go e and just extrude it back to here and then we're going to click on this face down here and in shift and control click on this face up here it's going to select everything in between then go x and delete those faces and then the same thing in here just delete those faces and also the opening at the bottom just select them and delete those faces and now what we're going to do is just shift and control or shift the command click on these guys here, these guys here. So it doesn't matter how you select them, just select them and disable proportional editing. And then we're going to once again, go to our object data properties. And remember the sewing group we created earlier, we're just going to assign those. So assign them, then go X and just go only faces. Then go to your vertex select option. And then with this sewing group selected, hit select. And you're going to see those are the faces or the vertices that are selected. selected. So what I'm also going to do is just select all of these vertices at the back, then go to the materials tab, and then go to the material tab, and then go to the material In fact, just go Ctrl-I to inverse the selection, so all the ones at the front. And then the ones at the front, we're going to give that Clough 1 material. But all the ones at the back will have that Clough 2 material. So let's tab out of Edit Mode. And then we're going to go to our first keyframe again. And then we're going to hit the Spacebar, and it's going to run the simulation and see what it looks like. Okay, that actually looks quite nice. And once again, with this selected, just go to Object and Enable Shade Smooth, so you get some nice smooth shading on there. That actually looks pretty cool. And you can see that the shirt is going to be tucked in, and the reason that is is because if you go back... frame one it's kind of sitting just a little bit it's going to wrap just a little bit faster because of how it is like it it just does the shirt always seems to wrap faster because it's wrapping faster and the pants are a bit slower the pants are going to kind of wrap on top of that and because we have self-collision enabled they should be interacting with each other because as far as blender is concerned these are all part of the same mesh so you can go back into edit mode and you can go alt h and just unhide this if you want but yeah just if you ever get a little bit confused here just select a vertex on any one of these hit l it'll select everything and you can hit h and then you can go alt h so just a little bit of organization there but anyway so back to frame one let's just let that run a bit more and just see what looks like. So yeah I just think this looks absolutely fantastic and once again and just to show you guys if you just select the close here and you go to your modifier stack you can anytime just enable the subdivision surface modifier and a solidify modifier. want. So that is so cool I really like it in fact you can see there's a little bit of a hole in here and some of these areas and you could close them by messing around with your settings a little bit more but I kind of like it it just gives it some character I think you would see that on sports clothing sometimes so it's I really like that but if you guys don't like it you can always come and increase the sewing force and maybe decrease the gap with the self-collision as well a little bit all those things I've shown you guys over here just mess around with those settings but yeah so let's cache this out and when I say cache it out means so instead of every time we open up the blend file and having to wait for this to like run again if we have it cached out it's going to be a lot better so what I'm going to do is just simply with this cloth selected to go over to your cloth settings and just minimize some of these tabs here just to make things a bit more organized the only one we need to drop down right now is the cache and we don't want to cache 250 frames because we're only working with 130 so let's make this 130 frames and we're obviously starting at frame one and make sure to save your file please that is very important whenever you're working with simulations guys do yourself a favor and save before you simulate or bake so with that done I'm gonna hit bake and then we're gonna come back and see what this looks like. Okay so now it's done caching so let's have a look. If we hit the spacebar that looks absolutely amazing. So we can see even with the animation it's all interacting and it looks pretty cool. I think... Blender has a pretty good cloth simulator and I'm really happy with it. I've really enjoyed learning about it. This is the stuff you can make and I just love these little details and wrinkles that you get where the bits kind of join together. And the pants kind of look like they're tucked in here. It just looks really cool. And if it's a little bit slow, all you can do is select a cloth and go to your modifier stack. And you can just kind of disable it in the viewport. So that should make it a little bit more real-time. So you can see that's a lot faster. But don't worry because you have the little camera enabled there. When you render this, it'll still render with the subdivision surface modifier. But anyway, this is the tutorial and like I said in the very beginning, I'm going to be making some example blend files with one of my own models on my Patreon. and it's going to be on the free dollar a month tier as well. So that's definitely worth checking out, guys, if you like this sort of thing. And it really supports the channel. It helps me to do some research, to look into things, and just make really cool content for the Blender community. I really appreciate you guys, and I hope you stay safe and look after each other. And I'll see you guys next time.

Okay, so you want to add pants and a shirt to your character in Blender. I'm going to show you how to do that step by step today. So you can see this is pretty much what we're going to be doing.

And this is due to a very big amount of success I've had on a video I posted four days ago about cloth sewing that has almost 60,000 views now. And I've had a lot of questions. And people have been asking me, how do I add pants and a shirt to my character? How do I stop the pants from sliding off? And how do you add it to an animated character?

That's been the number one question. So this is what I'm gonna be showing you guys how to do today. We're gonna actually be importing a character.

If you don't have one, I'm gonna quickly show you how to set it up in Blender, how we're gonna quickly add a very quick animation to it, and then how to add the pants and the shirt. In this case, it's like a sports style kind of apparel. How to add it, and you can see it's a little bit slow here, but if I turn off the subdivision surface modifier, this is pretty much it.

And this guy, and another more advanced example. I'm going to be making them available on my Patreon for the $3 tier or higher. So go ahead, check out the link for that in the description below.

But if you're not on Patreon, don't worry. I'm going to be showing you where to download this free model on the internet. Don't need an account. And then we're going to just quickly animate it and add the clothing.

You can see this looks absolutely amazing. And I'm going to be doing it step by step. So hit like and subscribe. And let's get into this really awesome tutorial.

I hope you guys learn something and enjoy it. Okay, so first of all, those of you who do not have a model to work with, you're going to go into the description below. There's going to be a link to download this guy over here. So when you open up the link, it's going to come to this.

It's going to be free. You don't have to create an account. you're going to come here and click on download.

You're then going to click here, it's going to download this file. And once it's done downloading, you are going to come to your downloads folder and you're just going to extract that. So you're just going to go and use whatever extraction software you use.

So I'm just going to extract the file here. And here you have this blend file. So just take that blend file and drag it onto your desktop wherever you can access it.

So in my case, I'm putting it on my desktop. And then I'm just going to open up a fresh scene in Blender. And I have reasons for doing this.

It's just so we get a fresh workspace. And we're just going to hit A and then X and just delete all of these objects in our scene. We're going to go to File and Append. And let's just go to our desktop or wherever. In this case, I put mine on my desktop.

I'm just going to click on that blend file. Go to Object. And I'm just going to grab all of these objects here and go Append. So here we have this guy now in a fresh scene.

There's a reason I'm doing it because if you just open up that blend file that you downloaded, it's just it doesn't have the workspace quite right. So this is an easy fresh way of solving that problem. So what we're going to do is just going to select the character over here by clicking on it.

Holding in shift we're going to select the armature here. So you have both of these items selected. Then you're going to go Ctrl I or Command I to inverse the selection.

You're going to hit X and you're going to delete. Then what we're going to do is we're going to select the armature over here, and we're going to hit 1 to go to our front orthographic view. Come over here to your timeline, and we're going to come to the end frame value and make it 130 and hit Enter.

We've got 140 frames to work with. Then we're going to come here, just drag this up over here. Make sure you're on frame 1, and on frame 1 of this armature selected, we're going to go into our pose mode over here.

Just go to pose mode, and we're quite simply just going to give this guy a T pose. It's going to make things a bit easier. Just grab the arm.

Over here on the right, this arm bone, and then go R to rotate it out. And then just grab this guy here and rotate it out a bit as well. Just like that.

And let's just then hit A to select all these bones. And we're going to go I. And just insert a location and a rotation keyframe here. And this has come to frame 30. And the reason we're going to have this T-pose just for a few frames is because when we initially modeled this cloth around the T-pose, we needed to kind of snap to or simulate. and collide with the body before we can have it animate.

So always have about 30 frames or so should work okay. So on frame 30 with all these bones selected, we're going to go I again and insert a location and rotation keyframe. So now we're going to have this hold here, which we're going to need in a T pose.

And then we're going to simply come to frame 70 or 80. So let's just make it frame 75 in this case. So in frame 75, Just do any kind of animation you want and this is just for demonstration purposes, so nothing fancy. I'm just going to grab this foot bone down here at the back and just move it up like this.

Go to the front orthographic view and then just grab the hip, just move it over a little bit so it kind of looks like he's doing something. Just like this. It doesn't have to be fancy, just maybe something like that. And grab the chest here maybe, rotate it out a bit. And maybe even rotate the head a little bit up.

So just get something that you think looks cool. So just to test out the cloth, so I'm going to maybe bring this arm up a little bit more. Then with that done, I'm going to hit A.

I might just rotate the hip a little bit. Okay, so hit A to select all of these bones. 75 we're gonna go I and when you insert a location and rotation keyframe and then we're just going to simply come to frame 120 and we're going to type in here this is hit f3 on a keyboard I was going to type in Clear Pose Transform.

So if you just type in Clear Pose, and you click on Clear Pose Transforms, it'll set everything back. Then we're gonna go I and insert a location and rotation keyframe. So this is just a little example animation.

So if we go to frame one and we just hit the space bar, you're gonna see we have this example little animation here. So it's not meant to be a final animation or anything fancy. It's just to demonstrate how you can add the cloth that we're about to do, the sewing.

So as As far as this character goes here, I'm also going to just tab into edit mode of it. So just grab the character, go into edit mode, and just quickly enable proportional editing. And we're just going to select this vertice here at the front, or vertex, and just move it back a little bit like this, and just correcting a few things over here.

Might just grab the sky, bring that in a little bit. And X mirror should be turned on, so it should happen on both sides. And I'm just fixing some of these things up a little bit on the model.

And we don't want too much pointiness here. Just something like this. Doesn't have to be too fancy. Maybe just grab a vertex at the back here and just bring it in a little bit. Just like this.

And then let's just also give this guy a subdivision surface modifier. So give it a subsurface modifier and get rid of the original one that I just rid of there and the reason we need this to have a nice smooth surface is because when we go over to our physics tab so our physics tab over here we want to give this mesh a collision so click on the collision here we can now see it has collision and the reason we want to be nice and smooth so when our cloth um interacts with the surface it's not going to be a rough rigid surface so the smoother this is the nicer our um our simulation is going to be for our cloth sewing so In this case, I've just given this guy a subdivision surface modifier, and on top of that afterwards, we gave it a collision. So you should see in your modifiers stack, an armature, a subsurf modifier, and then a collision. And once you've done that, this guy is now ready to go. So we can get into making our cloth now, and I'm going to show you how to make pants and then a shirt, and it's just going to be really fun.

Okay, so first of all, let's just organize our workspace a little bit. So I'm just going to select the armature by clicking on it, and let's just hit. M, the M key, and we're going to go New Collection.

And this is called as Rig, and go OK. Click on OK, and you can come over here to your Scene Collections. Just click on the little tick box here, and that'll hide that rig, but it is still very much active. You can also just hover over this, just drag it down.

This is a little bit more real estate here to work with. And once we have an organized scene, we can go into our front orthographic view. And I'm going to go Shift-A, go to Mesh Options, and just add in a plane.

With this plane selected, we're going to tab into edit mode. With all of these vertices selected, we're going to go R, X, 9, 0, and we're going to hit enter. If you have proportional editing enabled, just disable it. And then what we're going to do is just give this guy a mirror modifier. And then go A to select all of this, and go G, X, and just move it over to the side.

Enable clipping, and then go G, X, and just merge them together like this. So just something like that should be fine. So now if you go G and you move it, you see they're merged together. So let's just tap out of edit mode quickly.

Go G, Z and bring this guy up to about the groin area here. And then we're going to tap back into edit mode. And we're working in and out of edit mode so we can preserve this little origin point here. So we kind of don't want it to be sitting at the bottom here.

So in edit mode, with all of this selected, we're going to go G, Y. And we're just going to move these four vertices forward like this. And I'm going to show you how to very quickly turn this into some pants. So what we're going to do is we're going to select this bottom vertex first.

I'm going to go G and just move it up just below the groin over here. And you can go Z and go into wireframe if that helps. Select this vertex here and go G and move it over here. And then I'm going to grab this vertex here and bring it in over here. And then bring this one down a little bit.

So just something like this. And if it makes things a little bit easier, you can also grab your timeline here and drag it to frame 0, where our character is in the T pose, so we don't get the arms here on the side. It could make things a little bit easier.

Okay, so with that done, what we're going to do is with our mouse over here, our mouse cursor over here, we're going to go Control R, and you should see this yellow line appearing. So just double click, and that's going to add in a loop. With that loop selected, go double G, and it's going to slide it over. So we're sliding it over, and then we're going to grab this vertex here, and holding and Shift, we're going to select this vertex here, and we're simply going to go E and extrude these guys down. And we want our pants to be about down here.

Now obviously, this is up to you. It's your character. But if you want really long... Saggy pants, you could do that, but I'm just going to go something like basketball pants, almost, or sport pants. And what we're going to do now is grab this vertex, just bring it out a little bit more.

And we do want to think about the width of this. And even though these pants look a lot wider than the character, we want to give it a little bit of extra girth or curvature or a bit more volume because you've got to account for it wrapping around this surface here. So something like this or even a little bit more extended. is okay.

You don't have to worry about it. So now that we have these pants roughly done, what we're going to do is we're going to add some geometry. So with our mouse cursor over here, go control R or command R if you're a Mac user, and just roll your middle mouse button to add in some loops and about this many, double click.

And do the same thing up here, control R, and then roll in some loops, about this many, double click. And then you can come over here at the top, control R, see the yellow line. appearing roll your middle mouse button and add in some of these so we want these to love roughly look like a square grid we don't want any faces that are like almost like a rectangle like this is more square you can keep them the nicer this is gonna work so just keep that in mind and I like to add materials earlier on especially so I can see the color difference between this mesh and the mesh it's working on so I'm just gonna go down to the materials tab just click on the new here this is called this clock Cloth 1 and simply go down to the viewport display and just make it darker and increase something like the roughness. I just like the look of that in the viewport display personally. Create another one.

Just click on the little plus, go new. Okay, you don't have to assign it, but just call this Cloth 2 and I'm just going to make this one red or something in the viewport display and increase the roughness. So now in the front view, what I'm going to do. is shift alt click on this loop of vertices up here and go control plus to grow it twice and then i'm going to just go and just assign that cloth to material and then what i'm going to do is i'm going to go shift alt and click on this top row vertices and go e z and just extrude it up once more to about here and then i'm going to go to my face select and I'm going to go click on here to select a face and holding in shift and alt or shift and control, click on this face here and that's going to select everything in between. Then we're going to go X, but we're not going to delete faces, we're only going to go only faces.

And essentially that's just going to leave these edges in for us. Now you could do it like this if you wanted to, and then just duplicate over to the other side, but you could run into some issues where it extrudes these edges as well. So I would recommend not doing it this way, though you could, it'll just be a bit harder.

go um ctrl z or command z to undo that okay but you've got to remember that this later on is going to be um we're going to delete these over here but for now what we're going to do is do the same thing down here. So we're just going to go Shift-Alt, click on these, Shift and Alt, you can click on these faces here, and they'll just loop select these faces, and then we're going to assign a Cloth2 material, and eventually we're going to be deleting these faces in between here, leaving the edges. But for now, these are our pants.

So what we're going to do is we're going to hit A to select all of this geometry, and once you're happy with these pants, you can go E to extrude them, and we're going to extrude back to about here, right? Once you've done that, you can click on this face here, or you can just hit the C tool, and it's gonna bring up the C select tool, and you can just select these faces at the top and go X and just delete those faces. You can also hit the C tool down here and just select these bottom faces and go X and delete these faces.

And we don't need any faces in here because these are the opening areas of the pants. Obviously, we don't need them there. But what we need to do now is we need to click on this face here, holding in Shift and Alt, just a quick way.

just click on the face up here or shift and control and it's just select everything in between and once again you can also hit c and just bring up the c select tool and select everything in between so totally up to you how you want to do that and then what we're going to do is go to our object data properties here so click on it go to the vertex groups and we're going to go plus and we're going to go and assign these vertices to this group here right and let's just call this sewing and hit OK or Enter. And if we now hit AA to deselect all of this and we go Select, we should see all of these are selected in that group, which is what we want. And then we're also going to go Control and shift and just click inside of here and then click over here that's just going to select everything in between and then we're going to go with that group sewing group selected we're going to go assign and a good way to test this once again deselect everything and with this selected we can go select and it'll show you what is in that group what we also need to do now is with all of these Faces selected out here and in the groin area. We need to go X and we're going to go only faces So that's going to only delete the faces and leave the edges Which is exactly what we want and then we're going to add this little detail that I told you about so going Shift and alt when I click on here to select all of these faces shift and alt click on here and then in here as well So select all of these and shift alt click here. It's just like all of these, right?

And then what you're going to do is you're going to go X and you can go only faces. But before you do that, also just make sure to assign with all of those faces selected. Then go X and just delete only faces.

So now... go to your vertex select option and with the sewing group we're going to go select and you should see all of these vertices in the sides and in the inside here selected and these guys here that have to kind of snap together where we have these different bits down the bottom and these different bits at the top but nothing in between that and nothing at the top here and nothing at the bottom sleeve area here should be selected and what's going to happen is where these vertices vertices are in this group, if there's an edge between them, that's kind of where they're gonna snap together, where that edge is, right? That's why we don't want any of these guys added to this group, like the inside ones here.

So just so you guys understand what's going on, and you know what the issues are if they come up. So let's tab out of edit mode, and what we're gonna do next is add a cloth simulation to this, and make it look really cool. Okay, so with the pants selected, what we need to do is go over to our physics tab down here, so click on the physics tab.

Now let's give this guy a cloth simulation or cloth modifier. And first of all, just under the cloth settings here at the very top, we're going to take the quality steps, just bump it up to eight. If you have some issues, you can bump it up to 10, 11, if you want some better quality. But I find eight works fine for this sort of thing. Then simply just you can drop down this physics properties or just close it.

We don't need that. We're just going to simply go down to the shape for now and just enable sewing. So that's obviously what this is about, cloth sewing.

So enable that. We're going to get back to these two. settings here in a second, but then we also want to make sure the cloth can actually interact with itself. That's very important.

So let's go to the collisions here. First of all, just set the quality here to 8 as well. And we're just going to come down to the self collision option here and enable that. Now as far as this simulation goes, if we just quickly play it, right, if you hit the space bar on your own frame 1, you play it, you're gonna see it's gonna run, but you're gonna have some issues that we need to deal with and that is that the pants are gonna slide off. So if you remember earlier, when we just set this guy up, in our modifiers here, we added a collision, right?

You can see here, we have the armature, the subdivision surface, and the collision that we added over here. So just come over to the physics setting, and we're gonna, with this guy selected, under the collision settings here, and we just wanna come down to the friction and make that really high. So I'm gonna mine something like 50. You can experiment with that, but 40, 50 should do the job.

Then you can go to Object, just select the pants as well, and just go to the Object and just enable Shade Smooth. I just like the way that looks a little bit better. But you can see now if we go back to frame one and we hit the spacebar, it's not going to slide off. So that looks a lot better now. And once we have pants that are not falling off here, we can get on to the rest of the thing.

But you can see just right up front, just with those few settings like this, this actually looks pretty good. But some people have said that they get kind of like a big gap between the simulation and the object that they're working with. So if some things you want to try is make sure everything that you have, that including the cloth and the thing that it's simulating on, are applied.

So if you ever scale it and Object mode just go control a and make sure to apply to scale. That's also very important What you also want to do is with the character here selected is under the the collision settings You want to come to this thick thickness outer and you want to make it a bit smaller so you can make it point zero zero One for example, and that's just gonna close the gaps in between here as well And I might make this one point zero zero one on the inner value And you can also grab the cloth itself and under the collision settings you can come here to the distance and you can also decrease this number here if you're not happy with that gap. So making them all really small, turn back to frame one and then hitting the spacebar just to play it. And you can see this is too much so 0.01 might be better.

Under the distance, back to frame one, hit spacebar. So just mess around with that, you guys kind of have an idea of what's going on there. But what we also want to do is under the self collision, if we have too many of these gaps that aren't closing, we want to come to the self collision distance here, we want to decrease that.

So I'm going to make mine 0.01, and then give that a shot, go to frame one, hit the space bar, and just till you get something that you like. But for now, I'm kind of happy with these. settings over here, but let's get back to our actual sewing. So let's go back up to the shape, and under the shape we're gonna go to the sewing, and we're gonna go to the max sewing force, and obviously as the name suggests, the more it increases, the more it's gonna kind of like, pull together, so if I make this like 0.1 for example, and then go back to frame one, hit the space bar, it's just not enough, so what we're gonna do, is we're gonna take this max sewing force and maybe, gradually just increase it. So let's give 5 a shot.

And 5 is okay, but you can see it's still not quite where we want it. So let's just maybe even try something like 12. And this is where you can just gradually go up and see what works for you. So 12 seems to be okay. Maybe just bump it up.

In my case, I'll probably go up to 15. And then what we can do is we can also come over to the Oops, sorry, I accidentally made the friction over here 15. So just go over to the distance under the sewing here and make that 15. And let's see what's happening there. Okay, so that looks okay. And then also here the shrinking factor, we can make that something like 0.1 or 0.2, but anything more than that usually it crumbles up.

So let's just give that a shot. Okay, so what I'm going to do is I'm just going to make the shrinking factor 0.05 and then I'm going to make this max sewing force 21 and I'm going to give that a shot. So this is just one of those things you have to mess around with.

until you get something that you like. But in this case, these settings over here seem to work quite well. Now what we're going to do as well with these pants, while we have them selected, is we're going to go to our Modifiers stack.

Just minimize this mirror and minimize this cloth. And then we're going to go and give it give this guy a subdivision surface modifier. And then on top of that, we're gonna add a solidify modifier just to give this a little bit of thickness. And that just makes it look really cool. And this looks really awesome.

You can see we have some nice wrinkles in here and it just looks like some really nice pants that I'm quite happy with. So I'm gonna quickly show you how we can cache this out. And actually maybe not cache it out. I think next we'll actually just get started with the shirt.

And And the shirt is going to be attached to this, so we don't really have to change much more of the settings. It should be okay. But after that, I'm going to show you how to cache it out with the animation.

Okay, so I've already covered a shirt, like I said, in one of my earlier videos. But I'm going to cover it in this as well, show you how to add it to this. So let's just grab the pants here, tab into edit mode. And I'm on about somewhere between frame 0 and frame 10, so that's fine. Just so we get the pose where we want it to be.

So I'm going to tab into edit mode with these pants selected. And just any vertex on here selected just hit L or Ctrl L and that's going to select everything. And you can just hit H to hide it.

Okay so what we're going to do next is model the shirt. So I'm going to go while we're in edit mode now and do keep in mind we are inside of edit mode. So we're going to go Shift A.

in edit mode, we're going to add a plane. Then we're going to go RX 9-0, hit enter. Then we're going to go G, Z, and just move this guy up here. And in our modifiers stack, we just want to disable the subdivision surface modifier and the solidify modifier. Then go into your right orthographic view, and then go G, and just move this guy forward.

Go into your front orthographic view, and then just go G and move it over to the side, just so they snap together, and then bring it back in. Right? So just something like that.

And for now I'm just going to go to my materials tab and make this cloth too. Just so I can see it a little bit better, which makes things easier. And the shirt is even easier than the pants. So all we're going to do is grab these two vertices at the bottom and maybe bring them down a bit to about here.

And then you're going to grab this vertex here, bring it down just under the arm, bring this guy down to about here. Ctrl-R, double-click, double-G to slide in an edge loop here. And then you're going to grab these two vertices and go E to extrude them up. Then R to rotate them. And then Ctrl R once again in here to add a cut.

Click on these two vertices here and go E to shoot them up to here. Grab this guy over here and just bring it down. like that.

So already we're very quickly making a shirt as you can see here. And we're going to come over here, control R, just add in two cuts and control R, just add in one over here. And we simply want all of these to be roughly looking like squares.

Then we're going to hit A to select everything, right click and we're going to go subdivide. And then we're going to bump this up to about four. Should be okay.

So we have now four level of subdivision there. Just bring this down. Just deselect everything. everything, and now we have a shirt ready to go.

But what we can also do, just to smooth things out a bit, is we can go to our proportional Click on that and in your front view you select this corner vertex here. Go G and just move it out. You can roll your middle mouse wheel as you're going.

So just move it out to here like that. It doesn't really matter. You can also hit A to select all of this and go to your Smooth tool.

and just kind of smooth things out a little bit but you don't have to go too crazy so just go back up here okay so now we have our shirt quite simple what we're going to do is go to our face select option here and with all these faces selected we're going to go e and just extrude it back to here and then we're going to click on this face down here and in shift and control click on this face up here it's going to select everything in between then go x and delete those faces and then the same thing in here just delete those faces and also the opening at the bottom just select them and delete those faces and now what we're going to do is just shift and control or shift the command click on these guys here, these guys here. So it doesn't matter how you select them, just select them and disable proportional editing. And then we're going to once again, go to our object data properties.

And remember the sewing group we created earlier, we're just going to assign those. So assign them, then go X and just go only faces. Then go to your vertex select option.

And then with this sewing group selected, hit select. And you're going to see those are the faces or the vertices that are selected. selected. So what I'm also going to do is just select all of these vertices at the back, then go to the materials tab, and then go to the material tab, and then go to the material In fact, just go Ctrl-I to inverse the selection, so all the ones at the front. And then the ones at the front, we're going to give that Clough 1 material.

But all the ones at the back will have that Clough 2 material. So let's tab out of Edit Mode. And then we're going to go to our first keyframe again.

And then we're going to hit the Spacebar, and it's going to run the simulation and see what it looks like. Okay, that actually looks quite nice. And once again, with this selected, just go to Object and Enable Shade Smooth, so you get some nice smooth shading on there. That actually looks pretty cool. And you can see that the shirt is going to be tucked in, and the reason that is is because if you go back...

frame one it's kind of sitting just a little bit it's going to wrap just a little bit faster because of how it is like it it just does the shirt always seems to wrap faster because it's wrapping faster and the pants are a bit slower the pants are going to kind of wrap on top of that and because we have self-collision enabled they should be interacting with each other because as far as blender is concerned these are all part of the same mesh so you can go back into edit mode and you can go alt h and just unhide this if you want but yeah just if you ever get a little bit confused here just select a vertex on any one of these hit l it'll select everything and you can hit h and then you can go alt h so just a little bit of organization there but anyway so back to frame one let's just let that run a bit more and just see what looks like. So yeah I just think this looks absolutely fantastic and once again and just to show you guys if you just select the close here and you go to your modifier stack you can anytime just enable the subdivision surface modifier and a solidify modifier. want. So that is so cool I really like it in fact you can see there's a little bit of a hole in here and some of these areas and you could close them by messing around with your settings a little bit more but I kind of like it it just gives it some character I think you would see that on sports clothing sometimes so it's I really like that but if you guys don't like it you can always come and increase the sewing force and maybe decrease the gap with the self-collision as well a little bit all those things I've shown you guys over here just mess around with those settings but yeah so let's cache this out and when I say cache it out means so instead of every time we open up the blend file and having to wait for this to like run again if we have it cached out it's going to be a lot better so what I'm going to do is just simply with this cloth selected to go over to your cloth settings and just minimize some of these tabs here just to make things a bit more organized the only one we need to drop down right now is the cache and we don't want to cache 250 frames because we're only working with 130 so let's make this 130 frames and we're obviously starting at frame one and make sure to save your file please that is very important whenever you're working with simulations guys do yourself a favor and save before you simulate or bake so with that done I'm gonna hit bake and then we're gonna come back and see what this looks like.

Okay so now it's done caching so let's have a look. If we hit the spacebar that looks absolutely amazing. So we can see even with the animation it's all interacting and it looks pretty cool.

I think... Blender has a pretty good cloth simulator and I'm really happy with it. I've really enjoyed learning about it. This is the stuff you can make and I just love these little details and wrinkles that you get where the bits kind of join together.

And the pants kind of look like they're tucked in here. It just looks really cool. And if it's a little bit slow, all you can do is select a cloth and go to your modifier stack. And you can just kind of disable it in the viewport.

So that should make it a little bit more real-time. So you can see that's a lot faster. But don't worry because you have the little camera enabled there. When you render this, it'll still render with the subdivision surface modifier. But anyway, this is the tutorial and like I said in the very beginning, I'm going to be making some example blend files with one of my own models on my Patreon.

and it's going to be on the free dollar a month tier as well. So that's definitely worth checking out, guys, if you like this sort of thing. And it really supports the channel.

It helps me to do some research, to look into things, and just make really cool content for the Blender community. I really appreciate you guys, and I hope you stay safe and look after each other. And I'll see you guys next time.

Transcript for:Guide to Adding Clothing in Blender

Transcript for:
Guide to Adding Clothing in Blender