Clothes in Marvelous Designer

The most important thing to know about Marvelous Designer is that it’s mostly a block-in tool. It simulates clothing really well but it’s still basic and you really have to push the program and your computer to get anything close to the final result right out of MD. You need to bring what you get into ZBrush or Maya and tweak the geo/ sculpt for finer folds and details to get it production-ready.

I’m still learning and improving my Marvelous Designer workflow but the developer’s website has some fantastic resources for learning the program. My personal favorite resource for learning Marvelous Designer is the Gnomon tutorial by Paul Liaw and this tutorial from Seth Nash. If you can recreate this complex piece, you’ll be able to make almost anything.

There’s also an amazing new tool in MD that creates a pattern from UVs – it can speed up the process a bit for basic things like taking measurements and creating a fitting slope. I used this new tool for the star-shaped neck of the cape, I sculpted the shape in ZBrush and brought it into MD as a UV pattern. From there, I added the length and simulated the weight of the points.

When making a character with a lot of layers like Jjahawa, I would simulate one piece at a time. I would then export it as geo and reimport it into MD as a part of the avatar. This approach was less chaotic than the layering system or freezing, as I was never able to get the layering system working right (the more layers you add, the buggier it can get). I also found that clothes can interact better if you use this Morph Targets trick shared by Olivier Couston. Much like the modeling process, it’s all about working on one piece at a time. When everything is ready, bring it all together in ZBrush to see how it looks. A great resource for that can be found here, also from Olivier Couston.

Texturing

Roman Kupriianov had already established the color palette in his incredible concept, and it was my job to retain as much as possible and stay true to the concept. The first step in the texturing pipeline was to identify my main materials which you can see in my initial block-in with the colors. I use these as a base and build on them using some real-world references.

The most important resource I’ve found for developing a basic understanding of Character Materials and Rendering is Xavier Coelho-Kostolny’s YouTube channel.

For this project, the organic parts were made 100% in Mari and the costume was 70% Substance, 20% Mari, and 10% Photoshop.

Head

For the head, I used the same method as for the displacement but I took my cross-polarized images from Texturing XYZ and applied them to a plane, then wrapped it. This helped me to get around 75% of the face and hands done within a day. See the workflow here.