Joel Mongeon: Marvelous Designer Part 2: Taking the guess work out of pattern making

I've recently had some requests on how I use the 3d clothing tool Marvelous Designer by Clo3D.

I'm publishing a talk I gave to the students of DigiPen last year on my workflow. I developed this workflow for the game Sunset Overdrive by Insomniac Games. My job at Microsoft Studios was to teach the artists at Insomniac how to incorporate Marvelous Designer into their pipeline by creating sample pieces of clothing and doing on site demos and one on one training.

This paper assumes you have already read my intro to Marvelous Designer. You can find Part one on my website: http://www.joelmongeon.com/Whitepage.html

I'll also post a few images of the working examples I created for Insomniac and how I used Marvelous Designer to Simulate armor. If you have any questions feel free to ask in the comment section or send me and e-mail.

Enjoy!

Marvelous Designer workflow

Joel Mongeon

6/9/2014

This guide is not a replacement for the Marvelous Designer manual.

It is assumed that the reader is familiar with Marvelous Designer and basic modeling and unwrapping techniques.

REF

To begin designing a pattern, you need to look at real world examples of how the particular piece of clothing is constructed. In the case of jeans I found the above examples to use as guides.

DCC BLOCK OUT

Inside of my DCC app I blocked out the jeans keeping in mind where the seams would be if this were a real garment. The block out does not need to fit perfectly, just be a general guide for how the model will fit the avatar and where the pattern will be split.

I went ahead and also modeled the extra cuts I would need for the final pattern. I decided to add belt loops directly in Marvelous Designer without pre modeling in my dcc.

UNWRAP BLOCK OUT

When I am happy with the block out, I then unwrap and relax each panel that I identified from my reference using my dcc app’s automatic unwrapping tools. The resulting UV map shown above is what I will use as a template inside of Marvelous Designer.

I make sure to unwrap and relax the UV’s without any manual intervention. I have found that if I force a shape in UV space, my pattern will not drape correctly on my avatar!

CREATE A YARD STICK

The final step to creating a pattern that fits your avatar is to create a digital yardstick. I usually create a single polygon the height of my avatar. When I pack my UV’s I include this yardstick so that the size of the pattern and yardstick match each other relative to their size in the 3d viewport.

I now export a snapshot of my pattern and yardstick UV’s as a jpg file.

LOADING PATTERN INTO MARVELOUS DESIGNER

In Marvelous Designer I load in my avatar model and begin a new garment. I first create a square pattern that you can see in the top right of my avatar silhouette. This square is purely there so I can apply my UV guide as a texture map.

I then apply my pattern jpg as a texture map to the square pattern. Since I know the yard stick is the height of my avatar, I scale up my texture map until the top and bottom of the yardstick matches the top and bottom of my avatar’s silhouette.

Since the square pattern is only used as a reference, I disable the pattern in the 3d viewport so that it does not simulate when I am testing my actual patterns. To disable a pattern, right click on it in the 3d viewport.

MARVELOUS DESIGNER BASE PATTERN

I can now trace over the pattern I created in my dcc app.

I tend to use as few points as possible to create my patterns and heavily use the Edit Curve Point (V) tool to shape my 2d patterns to my pattern image.

At this point, since I already know the shape and size of my pattern it is easy to sew and drape my base onto the avatar. Pictured above is my very first drape of the base pattern. As you can see it fits the avatar perfectly and takes any guess work out of the pattern generation.

I also specify the type of fabric I am using for this garment at this stage. In this case I use the denim preset provided by Marvelous Designer.

ADD BELT LOOPS AND POCKETS

I decided to next add details to my basic patter including belt loops and pockets. The 2d patterns for these were drawn freehand in Marvelous Designer.

I used internal lines drawn on the original patterns for sewing purposes.