Tank Fabrics

Prop Breakdown

Konstantin Gerhald

Konstantin Gerhald

Vehicle Artist

Artstation

Goals

The main goal was to finally learn the fabrics pipeline and to make it as realistic as possible. The best instrument for this is, of course, Marvelous Designer. I decided to try making some military vehicle fabrics.

Software

I used Marvelous Designer for the cloth simulations themselves. Blender for some mesh corrections, UVs, and rendering. Substance Painter for texturing process.

References

For the main references, I used some real fabric examples and a couple of CG works.

Before I started I watched a couple of lessons around youtube. Especially 2 of them from FlippedNormals helped a lot.

Marvelous pipeline (fabric 01)

Before diving into cloth simulations, I import a reference model, that is used as a real collider for simulations. In my case, I used a couple of my tanks as you can see (pic.02)

When the models are set up – we are good to start messing with the fabrics itself.

For the first one – I simply created a rectangular piece of fabric (roughly good by dimensions – nothing too precise). Then I rolled it into a tube using “Select mesh tool” and rotating it all the time. From time to time I sewed the fabric with itself to make it more stable (pic.03)

When it was rolled – the next task was to fold it in half. For this I created a long piece of fabric and froze it. I used it as a barrier for throwing over it.

The next thing I did was to create the actual belts that hold the fabric. These were simply 2 short pieces of fabric with a rough length of belts. I pinned them to the actual place where they were supposed to be using the “Tack on avatar” tool, placed my fabric underneath and started simulation.

After a couple of iterations with the belts length/material settings, I got the final variant.

Before exporting the fabric – I quadrangulated it because I wanted to add a subdivision modifier later + quads always feel sexier.

After packing the UVs in Blender, adding Subdiv LVL 2 – I exported the model into Substance Painter.

Substance Painter pipeline (fabric 01)

First of all – you should bake all the necessary additional maps into the Bake section (except for the Normal and ID in this case). This will help us while using smart stuff.

For the actual fabric material I used a fabric generator from poliigon.com, that was purchased about a year ago. (Amazing work, Andrew!)

After setting up the fabric material I overlaid the next stuff:

Damaged fabric textures. I used free versions from Milad Kambari
Some mud
Oil leaks
Painted metal stuff and fabric stitches along the border

Leather and metal were just basic SP materials.

Marvelous pipeline (fabric 02)

Now the second interesting fabric – the gun mask for T90A tank.

First – I checked how the fabric seams are situated on the references and decided to create this mask using 4 pieces.

After importing the tank turret – the only hard thing was to get the right dimensions/shapes of the fabric pieces. This is where I spent around 3-4 hours. Can’t say I’m totally satisfied with the result, but here is where I came in the end.

Same thing with UVs and Subdiv in Blender and exporting to Substance Painter.

Substance Painter pipeline (fabric 02)

Very similar layers here, except that the fabric was actually leather.

Rendering

I use Blender`s Cycles for the render.

My lighting usually consists of HDRI + Rim light + Sidelight (if needed). For the HDRI I used the “Museumplein” from HDRI Haven (https://polyhaven.com/a/museumplein)

The lights I use in the scene are Sunlights with a big enough Angle (usually 15-20 degrees) and not too big power (0.5-2).

What about the camera – the important thing I learned some time ago is to set the Focal length so smth much bigger than default settings. I usually use 80-120mm.

For the postwork on the render, I use a cool free Photoshop add-on, called “Nik Collection”. It helps create any sorts of effects (like contrast/saturation/small dirt patches/vignette/etc), very fast and very cool– recommended!

And here we are with the final result: