No huge accomplishments today, but lots of refining, zippers, pockets, pads, belts, folds and pouches.

One of my favorite things in drawing is clothing folds, so naturally that translated into my love of modeling them in 3D.

Someone asked in the comments about how I go from tubular shapes to muscles and wielding tubes together. Until I fix the video I recorded here’s my attempt to write how I do it.

Creating Muscle Groups From Tube Shapes:

1. I start to outline the muscle groups by hardening hidden poly lines that I want to use to build the group using eraser+alt+ctrl. I also hide poly lines that do not relate to the outline of the muscle group using eraser+alt. If the muscle bulges out, you want to make sure you have enough polys inside the muscle group to create the bulge.
2. Once I’ve revealed the poly lines that I want use as the outline to the muscle group I will move the vertex points in 3D space to match the shape I want. In addition I translate whole polys to bulge out or in the muscles. This is slightly time consuming, but if you have enough sections in your tube extrusions it’s not too bad.
3. That’s pretty much it. You can almost do anything with this method.

Wielding Tubes Together:
(This method is used to connect the separate tube shapes to each other)

1. The shapes your going to wield should be near final to how you want to model them (at least where you’re going to wield them). This will save you some time in mistakes in incorrect forms. 
2. I group each tube shape that I’m going to wield, to prevent the two shapes automatically wielding which SketchUp is prone to do. The groups should have some overlap on each other so you can later match the geo.
3. Triple click one of the groups and edit the shape to the form you’d like.
4. Triple click the other group you plan on wielding with the first group and form that shape to how you want. When doing this you can move and snap the vertexes to the other group you’re going to eventually wield to. Ideally, you are snapping vertex to vertex, this creates a cleaner better wield.
5. When both groups are finished, erase any extra overlap in polys in both groups (you can do that later if you want). You’ll want both groups to share the same amount of connecting vertexes and poly lines.
6. Explode each group (I move one group into the other group using the outliner than explode).
7. Because you have aligned the vertexes you want wielded, SketchUp will automatically connect them together.
8. If you haven’t done so already, erase any geometry that isn’t visible outside the mesh.
9. Done!