I saw someone on the [link] asking how to make curtains in 3D. I haven't tried it before, but I wrote them a little tutorial while I experimented.


Make a nice curvy spline with the shape of the curtain as seen from above (don't give it any thickness), and extrude it to the height you want. Then drop a shell modifier to give it some thickness. After that, a noise modifier should help add a bit of randomness, if you tweak it a bit to your liking. I like a Fractal noise for it (I'm experimenting as I write this), but I'm sure you'll work that out. Enough noise and you can give a wind-blown look to it. Oh, and make sure you have a few segments to work with in the extrusion. Drop a meshsmooth on the top of the stack and weight the verticies appropriately - you want to have the ones at the bottom heavily weighted so the curtain doesn't get thinner at the bottom. Also focus on weighting the side facing the camera so it doesn't look too thin. I suggest having something covering the top of the curtains, I can't work out how to make that look clean and nice. For the frills, I suggest modeling one as a separate object, and repeatedly cloning it over the places you want it. I'm sure there's a better way to do that, but I'm not good enough to know of one yet. It's probably best to add these last. A couple bend modifiers can be good too. Once you've got your basic shape roughed out, remove the meshsmooth modifier (you can add it on later, it was just there to give you a sense of the final product). Then collapse the mesh to an editable poly and use the soft selection tools in there to further refine the shape of the mesh. Once you're happy, drop that meshsmooth back on, redo the vertex weightings, and add on the frills using the method I described earlier (sorry I can't be more helpful on that part). I hope some of that is useful!

Remember, if parts of what I've said don't make sense, try it and see if you can work it out on your own - most of it isn't too complex, I'm pretty new myself. If not, check the help files or google things before asking questions on the stuff I've said, the individual steps should be easy to read about if you have problems.

Sorry about the texturing, I haven't put much time into learning that well yet.