Good day,
I am in the middle of new project (Witch king from LOTR). I was creating wrinkly cloth robes and I wanted to make realistic tears in the cloth with thread coming out of it. I was trying to make it with just making holes and particle hair but it doesn't look realistic. Is there a better way to do the job? Or hair particles are my best way to go?
I think people do this with a mix of the alpha channel, painted textures or even including some of the rips in the mesh itself. Where the rips are is where your alpha will subtract from the cloth. See here, where the black is, it gets a transparency with the alpha.
Kent has a character creation course that maybe can help you out a bit. I don't think he goes through ripping cloth, but maybe there's something in there:
Hi Vitautas CCGngt ,
My suggestion would be to find some textures online, that you can use as alpha map, something like this:
(don't use this one, I don't know if it's CC0 or what), You can also make them yourself if you want.
If you need to get really close, that might not be enough, but I don't know of any other easy (or even not so easy) way of getting a decent result.
It really depends on the exact thing you want; in general, textures would probably be the best bet, but some special case might have another way that works.
Thank you very much for the answers! The masking alpha textures sounds promising and by the looks of the examples I think it will work well for me. Thank you guys again!