Modelling a mage hood

[shadowmancer471]

I was looking to model cloth with a similar texture to sack cloth or some other rough-hewn but flexible fabric.
I've only really done rigid materials made through extruding shapes and stuff before, and I have no idea what my workflow should be to properly create the seams and folds of a cloth hood
Have Blender, GIMP and Sculptris
Anyone else who's modelled this type of thing before have any tips?

[Jman]

There's a few methods you could use. You could sculpt one in zbrush, import to a program like max/maya, make a lowpoly and bake your sculpt on it to get nice folds. Or you could just go lowpoly and make a sort of hood shaped object and use soft selection to make it look more organic and add folds. Or you could just flat out low poly model it.

Overall it's basically a half sphere that meets a cylinder with an expanding bottom. It shouldn't be too tough other than making it look organic which soft selection can help you with if you don't know mudbox/zbrush/sculptris. For the UV I'd probably use unfold mapping and relax since I'm lazy.

[Stormy]

For something that small, if you don't need a highly detailed model, I would just draw the mesh vert by vert in blender (ctrl+lmb creates a new vert, or rather, it extrudes the current selection to the location you click). If you need a normal map then I suggest sculpting it in sculptris then exporting an .obj to blender to make a lowpoly, and bake it.

I would recommend the sculpting highpoly approach anyway, since that way you can bake normals, concavity and AO, which help a lot in the texturing stages and that extra detail can lead to lower polycounts, plus it's a good way to learn more about the tools. Organic modelling will almost always require sculpting a highpoly, and that hood is pretty much an organic shape.