Introduction

I grew up in small towns in Wyoming and Nevada until moving to Portland, Oregon in 2002. I went there to attend school at the Art Institute of Portland after stumbling through my first year of college in Nevada.

Since graduating in 2005, I’ve worked for the game art outsourcing company Liquid Development for just over 13 years, where I currently work as a Senior 3D Artist. I’ve had the privilege to work with a lot of talented artists during this time, to learn from them and to help teach others as my experience grew. Early on I worked as an Art Manager on Fable 2, Condemned 2, the Mass Effect series, as well as Halo 4, Halo 5, and Batman: Arkham Origins.

I grew up in the 80s and 90s and was glued to anything computer or video game related. I still get painfully nostalgic about this time in my life, right before the internet completely changed the way we interact with each other.

Bringing Marvelous Designer In

I first heard about Marvelous Designer from a video of the 2013 Kojima GDC presentation where they talked about Metal Gear Solid V. They showed how MD was being used to generate their character clothing, along with various props for the game. “Whoa,” I thought to myself, seeing what this program was capable of.

I’ve seen that MD is steadily becoming a standard tool for many character artists. It can be extremely useful when any time realistic cloth folds are required in a pinch, but getting specific results definitely requires some patience. More often than not, ZBrush and Marvelous Designer are used together to get a specific look, depending on what the Art Director is looking for.

The general workflow is to build a strong base in MD and convert that into a base mesh to be sculpted in ZBrush for further adjustment. The low poly mesh can be built and UV’d in your favorite 3D package, and eventually textured in either Substance Painter or directly in Photoshop.

I had just worked on some Marvelous Designer tutorials for our internal team at Liquid Development when some friends told me about the David and Diana Contest.