Marvelous Designer
What it is and how I/we used it
While using TikTok I came across the following videos from 3D artists using software called Marvelous Designer. When they create the clothes and simulate them on the avatar, the clothes move like real fabric in their walk cycles. Seeing our idea is to have dresses doing walk cycles and other actions with an invisible character in them, we decided to look into this software to see would it create what we were going for.
@stephy.fung on TikTok
@jamesmackk on TikTok
Marvelous Designer is software designed to create 3D clothes with realistic cloth behaviour. It is designed to be fast and easy cloth simulation and reusable with high-quality results. The team decided to go forward with using Marvelous Designer for the dress designs in the animation because we believed it would be better than something we could recreate in Maya as it is specifically designed for cloth movement and it would allow us to learn another software.
Initial Marvelous opening screen with a pre-loaded avatar. The 3D window on the left is where clothes can be moved around and simulated, the 2D window on the right is where clothes are designed, cut and sewed.
Marvelous Designer library containing basic garments
Loading in Marvelous’ own clothing onto the avatar.
Simulating Marvelous’ own clothes onto the avatar.
Creating the Secondary Dresses
As Emma, Hannah and Rachel were in charge of their own unreal scenes, they wanted to pick from the museum collection and do the main primary dress for their own scenes in Marvelous. As we had already discussed needing secondary characters for the scenes, such as a bartender, band, dancers and audience members, I took up creating the bartender and band dresses.
Speakeasies were the common bars in the 1920s area, but due to prohibition in America selling alcohol was illegal and the term speakeasy is still used today to describe retro style bars. As we were mainly focusing on ‘bringing the dresses to life’ in our brief, we decided that we didn’t need to highlight the illegalness of alcohol in that era, as it would largely limit what our bar scene could look like.
Bartender
This is a sketch I did of a dress style uniform for a speakeasy bartender to get created in Marvelous.
As we would need to animate our dress in maya, we have used a rig not found in Marvelous’ and imported it in as an fbx. We did this to prevent any issues of designing clothes for a certain rigs size, then using a different rig to animate the clothes on, and the dresses not simulating correctly due to the different rig proportions.
I tried following the above skirt tutorial in Marvelous to create a pleated skirt, but could not get the stitching to work right and when simulating the dress it would scrunch up badly instead of a pleat. I decided to follow a different tutorial instead for a pencil skirt, as we realised that the bartender would be mostly visible from the waist up anyway.
Fixing the issue of the hem of the skirt. It would bunch up and bow at the back, which would not work for attaching the rest of the fabric too, but the issue was down to creating the fabric length of the hem too long.
When simulating material, it snaps tight to the avatar which can cause issues if the rig then moves, and the cloth may bunch up or not snap together correctly. To fix this the size of the material should be increased or grabbed and moved until the majority of the fabric is shown as green here. This is not completely necessary to do especially in all areas of the rig but prevents any simulation issues later on.
Shown here is the long sleeve shirt found in the Marvelous’ library. I was going to follow a tutorial to create my own then realised it would largely end up looking very similar anyway, so I just readjusted the fit for our rig.
Feedback from Daryl
I sent my Marvelous bartender to Daryl for help surrounding issues including the suspenders slipping down the rigs shoulders, the armbands doing the same and I had wasn’t sure how to tuck the shirt into the dress. To fix this he showed me how to refit and pin the suspenders to the outfit, and that the best way to tuck a shirt in was to put the shirt closer to the rig first then simulate the skirt on top, all of which is shown below.
Band Dresses
Since we were given some creative freedom, I decided to base our band dresses on the band from ‘Some like it Hot’. I feel like this is a good cultural reference to include in our animation as it is an extremely popular film made in the ’50s about the ’20s era.
To create the see-through style of the sleeves I added a plain black texture to the sleeves and turned the opacity down as shown above.
To create the sparkling style main body of the dresses I created JPEG images on Procreate using a black background and the Glimmer paintbrush and just kept reapplying these until I was happy with the design. These are easily applied in Procreate similar to a ‘fill’ style of adding colour.
I would have liked to experiment further with the texture of the dress and added frills and a better texture to the front, but as these were secondary background characters and I had time constraints, we had to settle for the JPEG sparkle.
