Hi guys!
Let's see. I wanted to mention a few things i.r.t. other posts first, if I can remember them all.
Tier and I made a list of all the clothes, and we posted it as a sticky in the Better Clothes Team thread. It might be useful.
I've worked on texturing the pants mesh in my spare time, but haven't achieved a completed one yet. I have an original brain-tanned leather pants and the commonpants 1z.
Cali, you have done a very nice job on the pants. I noticed your note on the expensive pants you are pleased with. I like those too because the wrinkles have a nice pattern.
With this mesh, any deep shadows and highlights come off as being just darks and lights in the fabric, as if someone spilled bleach on them. That is because the mesh is so smooth. The illusion of depth holds until the figure moves. Have you noticed the same thing? I had the same trouble on the bodies.
If you want a highlight, you have to do it really well, with very careful modeling of reflected light and shadow and finally a small area of brightest highlight. Everywhere I just had a lightened area, it looked like someone rubbed chalk.
What I'm getting at is that you might create a "soft light" layer of a desaturated pants texture you are really pleased with, and put it on top of your other texture. (I'll call it a"wrinkle layer".) That way, you could concentrate on getting the fabric colors nice and medium in tone and then create the highlights and shadows by using the desaturated "soft light" layer in different degrees of opacity. You can also try using that layer as "luminosity" or "multiply" or "overlay", for various effects.
"Soft light" layers tend to be the most gentle, but they can add a warm glow to the texture.
"Luminosity" will wipe out surface detail of the cloth unless it is set very low.
"Multiply" will give a desaturated shading that is a bit grey.
"Overlay" will give a yellowish tint, as if the light shining were yellow.
Something nice about working with a desaturated layer used for these types of luminosity is that you can use the burn or dodge tool to make all your painting on that wrinkle layer, and then use the soften tool to blend according to luminosity or on normal.
That will free you up to work on the cloth texture layer without worrying about shading. In fact,the best effect is to make the cloth layer just about flat and use different "filter" tools to get a pleasing surface texture.
Cali, you mentioned that the pants come out darker even though you are using essentially the original textures. This is partly due to the way that the texture is altered when we stretch it to fit our new mesh.
I noticed also you had the same trouble as I did: finding where in the heck is the knee! It looks like you got it right on a few of the textures.
The waist band hem was a small challenge for me as well. I wanted a nice, rounded hem at the top of the pants with a small highlight to trim them off nicely. I worked on that for a while until I got it to look good at the back where it joins.
I don't know if you are doing this, but I don't use the black background on the textures unless I am doing a DXT3 dds with transparency. For these pants, I'm using DXT1 dds and just giving the entire canvas a nice pants color. This helps on the seams, especially the one on the back.
I kinda wished there were a seam on the sides as well, since most pants are made that way. I know. I usually hate the seams, but that one would have been handy for the jeans style.
The gaitors at the ankles are not very pleasing to me. I think they are necessary to have the right look for the original replacers, but we really should alter the mesh for those. It would be a fairly easy fix, now that you have made some textures to go by.
We should make that request to Neuman, or perhaps someone else with some time to put in on the mesh.
I know I'm forgetting something. But this is getting pretty long.
I'm so happy to see you doing this.