Shu's Project Blog

One cannot imagine how much goes into a dress.

Anna's dress was specially and lovingly designed for Blue. A day after week 5 preso on 20 Aug, I started on the dress. I was so excited as it was almost the last piece of modeling for me (beside the hair and perhaps eyelashes, teeth and tongue). And it was the fun part -- after the grueling task of modeling the human body - one of the toughest modeling task one can ask for.  Unless of course one does not care for correctness of proportion, aesthetics and other fine details of the human anatomy - a beautiful creation of God. The hardest was over when the body modeling was complete. And I knew I would soon be able to go into UVs, rigging, and animation - tasks that are to me much more "technical" and therefore can be done quickly.

I knew it would take me a day probably, and two the most to model the dress. It was completed in one day on 21 Aug evening, when I was then happily about to go into UVs, rigging, skinning over the next couple of days. Ironically.

I did quite a bit of research of little girls' fashion to model the dress. I flipped the glossy pages of Italian magazine Vogue bambini May/June 2009 issue that I bought from a news agent, and really liked the dress on page 46-47 (spring/summer collection on the Italian il gufo) -- a little girl with a pretty frock -- white bodice with 2 cm wide shoulder straps, purple high-waist gathered skirt with thick yellow trimmings at the bottom.  I also liked the dress at the Bambini website (streets of Paris). Essentially these 2 styles are similar - with thick shoulder straps, and high-waist gathered skirts. Yes, I would fashion Blue's dress like this - thick straps over the shoulders, high-waist skirt with gathers. Minus the ribbons and lace trimmings. A simple elegant bluish-white dress with a bit of incandescence - that would be the perfect dress for a little girl moving gracefully underwater.

How do I begin to model the dress? What is the technique?

Autodesk Area tutorial Modeling Clothes gives me an idea of the approach to take.  "When you create some clothes on top of a body, you have to check the loops of the underlying mesh. Try, as much as possible, to match the subdivisions." So what I did was to recreate almost the same upper body mesh (following Autodesk Area tutorial Subdivision Body Model) and from there, modified it to make it into the dress. That includes the arm-pit edge loops.


A starting approach ..using body mesh ... dress edge loops similar to body (that starts with a 12-sided cylinder)

Since I've the intention to use Maya nCloth one day (after the major project is over), I decided to look at Getting Started with Maya Unlimited 2009  (Lesson 3Creating nCloth clothing).  I want to make it "nCloth ready" even if I'm not using nCloth currently.  After all, I'd done some research and testing into nCloth during the June holidays, and know the overall concept and what it takes.

I followed the way the shoulder straps are modeled, and also the gathers, from the nCloth tutorial's dress. In fact the edges and edge loops are exactly the same.


Shoulder straps following Maya nCloth Tutorial dress; white dress with blueish tinge with incandescence


Lengthen to form skirt and add gathers following nCloth tutorial dress

And as stated in Autodesk Area tutorial Modeling clothes:
"Clothes, is fabric with seams! ...  you need to add those seams to make them look real."

So here goes the final touches -- adding seams to the high waist! And also, I added more edge loops to the straps...


Final touches -- adding high-waist seams

But alas, when Blue has her pretty dress ready, she has to turn back into Anna on that faithful night.
And that's the story of why Anna has an elegant blue dress and beautiful bare feet.

So here's beautiful, kind, bright and innocent Anna in her pretty blue frock! :-)


Anna in her pretty blue frock