Long Coats
It can get pretty cold in England, especially at night. We don’t know what time of year Smuggler Bill met with his sticky end, but since it will be nice to have some wind gusting or even howling in the background, I will assume it was a pretty chilly night and coats, for those who could afford them, would have been the order of the day.
Now you can buy some quite nice costumes from the iClone market place, but I wanted to have a go at making some clothes and saving some money at the same time. Having already previously made a tricorn hat, I thought I would have a go at making an overcoat using an iClone5 CloneCloth template.
A lot of people use PhotoShop as their preferred art package. For reasons of economy I use PaintShop Pro and at the time of writing this post was on release X4. There are tutorials out there already for using PhotoShop to edit CloneCloth. Hopefully this post will be useful for those who don’t use PhotoShop.
I have put Chuck on stage and have loaded the Actor / Upper Body / Chuck_Upper_Overcoat. I suspect this coat is a bit long for smugglers and excise men who will need to be nimble, ride horses and may have to wade in the sea. By clicking the Launch button on the right of the screen, my PaintShop Pro opens with the CloneCloth template already loaded. (I had already set this up as my default Texture Editor in the Preferences panel, which can be opened by clicking the small cog like symbol (next to the ?) at the top right of the iClone5 screen).
The grid lines represent the best places to cut, in order to tailor the outfit to our needs. One item seems to be mislabelled. The top item labelled “Sleeve Left” is in fact the undershirt. If you look at the top picture in this post, you will notice this has a kind of turtle neck look to it. That is something I intend to shorten. The idea is that everything that is white on the Opacity Map will show up in iClone and everything that is black will not. So to make the coat shorter for example we will fill some of the lower parts with black and the bits we want to keep with white.
People have different preferences, but I find the Lasso / Point to Point option allows me to make the most accurate selection.
Having made an outline selection using the lasso tool, in the picture above I am now painting the inside of the selection white. You may note that my selection does not reach down to the bottom of the panel. Perhaps that is easier to spot in the picture below.
The whole selection is now white and I need to apply the same technique to the other panels. In some cases (where a panel is the mirror image of another one), it is easier to copy the first selection (Ctl + C) and then Edit / Paste as New Selection (Ctl + E), and then under the Image menu perform a ‘Flip horizontal’ on the pasted selection and then move it into position.
Once I had painted all my panels white, I went into the Selections menu and selected Invert. This made the area outside my selections active for painting and I filled it with black as in the picture above. I saved this as a .jpg with the word Opacity in the file name, so I would know what it was for. You may notice I took the opportunity to remove the turtle neck from the undershirt.
I then inverted my selections again and this time filled them with patterns. You will note that the undershirt panel has been painted with a different pattern from the coat panels. This was then saved as a .jpg and this time I included the word ‘Diffuse’ in the file name.
Back in iClone I first clicked on the Opacity button on the right of the screen and selected my Opacity .jpg which I had saved in PaintShop Pro. This made the parts of the CloneCloth template which I had painted black disappear. I then did the same with the Diffuse button and .jpg to cover the still visible parts of the template with the pattern / texture Diffuse image I had saved.
OK he looks a bit garish, but may be he won’t look so bright at night. Of course I can go back to PaintShop Pro and try some other pattern fills & colours. Alternatively I can try to adjust his colour scheme within iClone itself.
Using the Brightness, Contrast, Hue and Saturation sliders on the right of the screen, we can make Chuck’s costume look quite different. This will be very useful for re-using clothes on different characters.