having some trouble. When do you start rigging? When the whole outfit is fully build (ie solidified stuff ?) Or do you rig and build at the same time?

I am making a hoodie, and I build one side of the thing (no solidify) I used multi res to sculpt it a little

baked normals and baked the ao maps

now I want to make the hoodie have some thickness to it, so I added a solidify mod, and editted it so it doesnt have that strange pixel stretch on the edges

but now I am unsure what to do. I didn't want to make the inside of the hoodie have a diff texture space, but also I still need to rigg it, and I hear it's hard to rig something with two sides to it. How do I go about this?

I make jewelry, so maybe the process is different - but, I make my item and save rigging [if there is any] until very last, because with the avatar modifier, you can't apply things like mirror [I do use Blender too, so that could make a difference too]

rigging is the very last step for me - if i am rigging a double sided thing and it's making trouble, i will make a copy of the thing, rip out the insides, rig that and then copy weights to the final, double-sided version.

o0o0o copy weights.. I don't think I ever used that >.< lol and thank you Fearyfox(Reyn) ! I appreciate you replurking this, I keep thinking if I leave it for the end I'll have hell. I'm going to try this time. Thanks Fearyfox(Reyn) and /usr/sbin/ennui !

Glad to help!

copy weights isn't exactly the right terminology, but - assuming you're using blender and avastar, which i guess you are - have the avastar armature, one-sided, rigged item and the two-sided, unrigged item displayed, select the unrigged item, shift-select the armature, then from the avastar tool shelf, "bind to armature" and select "mesh" as the weight

source

there's a similar way of doing stuff in maya, look it up in the documentation, been a while since i last rigged anything in maya