Raphdog

Creating Wrapped Meshes

Continuing my usual today in Blender, and I decided to try out attaching some sort of clothing or outfit onto a pre-made character model. Cloth might still be a little too advanced for me, so I wanted to try something simpler - in this case a leather chest harness.

Initially, I started by following an old tutorial on the Nexus Mods Wiki for creating a belt. This tutorial suggested using a curve, and then an array modifier on a section of the belt in order to repeat it along the curve path. This would have been a good idea, but something messed up real bad - the sections which were supposed to follow the path but did nothing of the sort.

I was getting a bit irritated so I wanted to move on to something else. I found another tutorial a little closer to what I was trying to do, which suggested I should just extrude planes against the figure I wanted. Not as interesting of a solution, but it did work of course, and I managed to get quite a decent result.

My leather bulldog harness - modelled to fit a beefy Orc model

It feels like this would be more difficult to adjust to different models later, but I might be able to use a shrinkwrap modifier or something to get the straps of the harness to hug the model a bit more. It was quite annoying and time consuming to get it right for just a single specific model.

I’m hoping to return to this and see if I can improve it, and I do have some ideas:

  • Better use of Blender tools to avoid manual effort
  • More natural shaping, like deforming the leather around the rivets
  • Better texturing, maybe edge stiching
  • Figure out a way to keep the harness on the skin when posing, so that it moves with the figure rather than just being anchored to a single point on it

Assets used