Eleanore's wardrobe

I was responsible for the cloth simulations on the film. Although I am not of a very "technical" disposition, this appealed to me, since it meant that I was fully responsible for the characters as a whole, from their design to the way their clothes moved. My only regret is that I did not study the latter, before the former. That is to say, I sculpted the clothes in Zbrush, complicated folds and all, and then recreated the topology to make it "low-poly", supposing that this might "help" the simulation. It did not. Moreover, since these were my first tentative steps into the world of cloth simulation (steps that often seemed to be taken in very wet sand) it took me a while to understand that the problem did not lie simply in my settings, but in the mesh itself. Fortunately, once I had figured this out, and remodelled and retextured all the clothes accordingly, it all went swimmingly. Unfortunately, before I figured this out, before I even started testing the simulations, I created two completely different dresses for Eleanore, until I was satisfied with her appearance. I dearly hope this is the only character I ever model who can boast superfluous clothes. But at least I learnt quite a bit about Zbrush - and more importantly, I learnt that if I know that somewhere towards the end of production lies a task I know nothing about, I should do some very pre-emptive dabbling before launching into the production of elements which may then turn out to be useless.