Shadows on Textures

#1 Draw them on. No, really.

#2 Ok haha, thanks. Do you have any tips, such as how do I make it look like wrinkles instead of just darkened pieces of cloth?

#3 Remembering my old painting-model-soldiers days, you've just got to get the wrinkles in the right place - they are just darkened pieces of cloth, but it's the positioning and shape that counts. Also, don't forget the highlights. Have a look at some real cloth that has the texture you want and see how its wrinkles are shaped, spaced, and see what colour the highlights and shades are.

#4 Ok, thank you guys!

#5 you could create the wrinkles in the mesh, weight the vertices accordingly (cloth physics are hard to come by), and not have to draw them at all. They'd look more realistic though they would raise your poly count a bit.

#6 What Steve and Dan said. I think you really have to hone your art skills to be able to paint good character textures. Just practice I guess.

Another way that I think a lot of studios use these days is to make a second character model with really high poly count with all the wrinkles and high detail modelled in and use that to bake a texture for the low poly game version. But then you need access to some expensive modelling packages like zbrush or mudbox.

#7 Well, a $100-$150 modeller can also do it (maybe the free Blender also…but it's for masochists ;). I just tested a few trial versions today, and found some texture baking function or other in a few. Cheetah 3D is the one that looked closest to perfect for me.

#8 ... its a shame its Mac only, looks like a lot of bang for your buck

#9 You can find similar for Windows if you look around - there's usually more for Windows even in that field. 3DS Max has still not been ported!

Here's a Blender guide to texture baking, though:
www.mahalo.com/how-to-learn-texture-baking-in-blender

#10 Was about to plug Blender, but you beat me to it, Ronny! But it does depend on your ability to make a great hi-res mesh. Me personally, I'd rather try to paint wrinkles on in 2D than make convincing fabric in 3D.