We got into making content for virtual worlds in 2008 when we were taking a year off from Burning Man (an arts and culture festival in northern Nevada) and had a lot of time on our hands. At that time, we discovered a BBC documentary called Visions Of The Future presented by Dr. Michio Kaku – a brilliant theoretical physicist and futurist who we are big fans of. In the program, he talked about virtual worlds, specifically Second Life, and he even mentioned that they had a virtual version of Burning Man that took place in-world. We decided to look it up and check it out and were immediately hooked. We had been making 2D and 3D art for years at that point, and immediately started making things and playing around to see what we could do.

Clothes in Games

80lv: A big part of your work is clothes so let’s talk about the general principles of clothes in games today. In general, what is a clothing asset in a game – is it a mesh, some textures, and UVs? Is physics necessarily involved?

Trilo: I think the definition depends on the platform.

BlakOpal: When we started in Second Life, creating clothes was mostly applying texture layers to the avatar or simple object primitives (SL calls them prims). Later on, they added support for 3D models.

Trilo: In most 3D programs including Unity, clothes would be a combination of the 3D model that you’ve cut or unwrapped UVs for and the textures and materials that you apply to the model. Physics can be involved but isn’t a requirement.

BlakOpal: But it’s more than just physics, you also need to create and configure colliders so the clothing respects the mass of the body and doesn’t go through it.

Trilo: SineSpace is the first virtual world we’re aware of that has cloth physics. Once we discovered that was going to be possible back in 2016 we were hooked.

BlakOpal: we were the first creators to have clothing with working cloth physics in SineSpace in December of 2016.

Trilo (laughing): I don’t think I slept at all that month. Figuring it out and getting it to behave the way we wanted took so much time!

Clothes Production

80lv: You’ve most recently published a nice tutorial on the way you can create clothes in SineSpace, but I’d like to learn how you actually built this T-shirt. What is a good way to create a fabric-based asset? Do you utilize Marvelous Designer or any other tools for that? What is a good and reliable way to create clothes for games?

Trilo: Thank you very much. That wasn’t my shirt, it was a generic model that used to come with the SineSpace Editor Pack. They don’t include it anymore (to try and keep the Editor Pack filesize down), but they have a whole bunch of free clothing templates available for creators on mod.io.

One of the great things about making things for SineSpace is that it’s based on the Unity game engine, and Unity can work with almost anything. You can use whatever 3D modeling program you like, as long as it can export an FBX, DAE, or OBJ file. You can use anything from free programs like Blender to commercial programs like ZBrush, Modo, Cinema 4D, Marvelous Designer, Maya… the list goes on and on. It’s just a matter of finding a program (or programs) that you like and is within your budget and learning how to use the tools.

For texturing, you can use free programs like GIMP (the GNU Image Manipulation Program) or Krita, or commercial programs like Pixelmator, Photoshop, Substance Painter or Mari. A lot of modeling programs have pretty good tools for texturing built in, too. The choices here are endless, it’s about finding the right program for your budget and learning how to use it.

BlakOpal: I like to start a piece in Marvelous Designer, but from there it goes into other programs. The fabric draping in Marvelous Designer is a great way to start a piece.