Hi all! For this challenge, I wanted to put together something that reflects my sense of fashion and design — while also not stressing too much about the outcome, since I’m not an actual fashion designer.

I didn’t have any clear initial ideas or sources of inspiration, but while experimenting with Houdini’s heightfield noises, I came up with the idea of transferring some undulating shapes onto a long overcoat as stitching lines. As the coat began to take on a somewhat avant-garde form, I wanted to tone things down by creating a subtler, quieter rest of the outfit.

I designed the sunglasses in Houdini by building a node system that generates endless distorted circle shapes for the lenses by simply adjusting a random seed. For the frames, I wanted them to feel very handcrafted and a little bit extravagant. The shoes weren’t meant to play a big role, so I sculpted and retopologized a simple pair of chunky loafers in Blender. The texture for the scarf was created in the terrain software Gaea. I remembered that you can easily extract different color maps from the terrains you generate, so by combining a couple of exported images, I was able to create a unique and interesting texture for the scarf.

Not that it matters for this contest, but I sculpted the male figure in ZBrush from scratch (sphere) and hand-painted the skin textures. It didn’t turn out super amazing, but doing it this way gave me more control over the character’s overall look. I don’t see myself doing retopology for a human character again anytime soon…

This contest was a great opportunity to learn more about 3D clothing. I managed to get a decent grip on Marvelous Designer, but I definitely need to start incorporating ZBrush and Substance Painter into my workflow.

I made the animation (and the soundtrack;) to further explore the overall mood I wanted to convey with the outfit. Everything was rendered in V-Ray for Houdini without any post work.

Huh, thought I'd keep it short, but there you go.