The ideal way of making clothes is to actually model the patterns, sew them together, make the character 'wear' them and use cloth simulation to deform them to achieve realistic results. But there must be a good cloth simulation technology to support this process. Here I'm trying to use Maya's nCloth system to do this.

Workflow Overview

In essence, pattern is polygon object, stitch is implemented using joints. But the building process is quite complicated. Fortunately, it is possible to be automated and the majority of the tasks can be encapsulated and hidden inside a few commands (see figure below). So it can be summarised into the following steps:

Make body measurement Outline patterns Create patterns involves Create Pattern, Create Garment Create stitches involves Create Stitch, Create Weld Constraint Set keyframes involves Set Keyframes, Attach Adjacent Stitches Play simulation for stitching to obtain default pose Play simulation for posing involves Duplicate Garment As you see, most of the work are done by the commands. It remains tailor's work: making body measurement, outlining pattern, which are up to you. All the other work are mechanical and can be automated. The following sections will describe the process in detail by making a simple blouse so that you'll see how the commands work.

Download and Install

Disable Undo

It is recommended that you should disable Undo before using jc.clothes. Because each command involves a lot of actions, especially jc.clothes -> Create Stitch which can involve thousands if pattern division is high. Each command invocation would be stored in one undo step which occupies memory. More memory would be taken if more actions are involved. Maya would nearly come to a halt if the amount taken exceeds the amount you've got and it won't tell you there's not enough until a Runtime Error dialog box pops up.