How can I achieve subtle fabric folds in sculpting without a rubbery look?

[Aurora11]

I’ve been trying to nail down a good workflow for creating realistic fabric folds on my character models, but I keep hitting a wall with the sculpting phase. My cloth brushes just aren’t giving me the subtle secondary creases and tension points I see in reference photos, and the whole thing ends up looking stiff or like it’s made of rubber instead of cloth. I’m wondering if my approach to the underlying mesh or my brush settings is fundamentally wrong.

[PatrickT]

I hear you. I chased the same issue for weeks. My breakthrough came when I stopped trying to sculpt every crease in one pass and treated it more like layering a drawing. I started with a softer base mesh so gravity could do some work, then slowly added a few fine creases with a very light touch on the brush. I kept reference images open and checked from a few side angles, not just a straight front. A single, subtle secondary crease along the stretch lines made the read on the fabric feel more natural and less rubbery.

[Jack54]

Another thing I tried was dropping into a higher res pass only near the joints and using pinch and smooth in alternation. I added edge loops around the hip and knee regions to give the drape something to hold onto, not just blobs. I measured the tension by nudging it in and out and watched the secondary lines appear where I added geometry. It wasn't perfect, but it helped.

[Jerry_R]

I started to suspect the problem might be the base proportions. I had a torso a size or two off and the folds clipped oddly. I redid the retopo to balance density: denser around arcs where folds form and looser elsewhere. It was a lot of tweaks and re-mesh exports, and I can't say it was worth it yet, but the result felt more believable after a week of small changes.

[Jacob90]

I kept playing with lighting and matcaps last weekend and swear the same model could read totally different folds under two setups. One setup hid the creases and the other exaggerated them, which made me rethink what real looks like. Maybe the geometry is fine, maybe the reading is just wrong depending on render. Either way I keep coming back to pushing the underlying mesh a bit and dialing brush strength rather than chasing a perfect brush preset.