How to Quickly Create Clothing using Blender and Marvelous Designer

hello friends Martin here and welcome to this new tutorial on my channel this time another one of the character creation tutorials and in it I will actually introduce you to this awesome tool called marvelous designer in which you can create your own cg clothing in a matter of minutes so let's get to it as mentioned we'll be using Marvelous Designer this awesome tool that completely revolutionized making cg clothing I've always been afraid of sculpting clothes because I know how much I suck at it but with this software complex shapes and cloth simulation is now a question of just a few clicks and a few simple tacks on digital fabric well don't take my word for it just watch this tutorial and you'll see for yourself here at what version of blender I'm using that's right it's the release candidate version that just came out with this beautiful splash screen from the awesome open movie spring so exciting to finally see the final version of blender 2.8 might actually become a reality speaking of which now it's really the best time to start with blender and there's really no better way than to try the new blender launchpad course by Zack Reinhardt who now under the banner of his new platform cg boost just released this comprehensive introduction to blender 2.8 and I mean it's aimed at beginners but I try to course myself and I must say I'm learning something new in every chapter so I guess I'm not so advanced after all but yeah big shout out to Zack for finishing this epic course I really can't recommend it enough and if you want to get it just click on the link in the description below to the actual tutorial first things first if you haven't watched my how to quickly add animated characters using Adobe fuse definitely do that because it's sort of a prequel to today's tutorial in it I show you how to create your own characters using be adobe few software which is free for everyone in its current beta stage and I don't really think it will get out of this beta stage anytime soon so either head out to the tutorial or simply use your own animated character very quickly here you can see me importing the character from fuse and mix them oh this one is in Colada format and you may actually want to check that your armature doesn't have any rotation or scaling so that's why I hit control a here and apply both scale and rotation every time I want to create a garment in Marvel's designer which is supposed to conform to some pose character is making the first step I do is adding a tee pose to the animation the reason is we want to first create a clothing when the character is in its neutral pose and only then start animating it with the garment on so that's why here I immediately go to the pose mode select all my bones with a and switch to graph editor here I select all my keyframes and push them to the right forward in time you can hit G and lock your axis on X to lock the movement of your keys only to the right and let's push them so that the actual animation starts at around frame 30 or so then go back to frame 1 and here click on post clear transform and all and in the 3d viewport hit AI and choose available to add a keyframe for all your selected bones this way we have keep their position and rotation at the same time now when you scrub through your timeline you can see that the post linearly transforms from the T pose to our animation here I also delete other keyframes that I don't need in this case since I won't dispose right here to be the end pose something you can do as well before exporting to Marvel's designer is to bake your keyframe for that just go to post animation and bake action where you just choose your end frame in my case it's 59 click OK and voila all your frames are baked so that there is a keyframe on each frame of your animation now all you have to do is to select the whole hierarchy of your armature here and export it as a px just check selected objects here and that's it now switch to Marvel's designer to create our clothing what I really like about Marvel's designer is the fact that you actually need to know only a very little to start messing around with some basic clothing and cloth simulation so on the left you have this 3d viewport where we are going to be adjusting our garment by various hand and pin tools and by way to move around in the viewport just hold down alt and left click to rotate middle mouse button to pan around and to zoom in and out just hold down right mouse button and here on the right in the 2d pattern window we create pieces of our clothing and stitch them together I will not go too deep on purpose here so let's just follow along and at the end of it you'll have enough knowledge about this software to make your own pieces of clothing first off of course let's import our character so here an import dialog choose FBX and find a model we've exported from blender you'll be asked various stuff here in the import tab but let's ignore everything now except for this or a scale option check that one with that click OK and your character or rather an avatar how it's called here in Marvel's designer will be imported on this character we'll be painting pieces of clothing but first off let's jump up here into the animation mode and check whether we have our animation imported as well good it's here so let's get back to simulation mode so as mentioned we'll be creating this basic garment this is actually a piece of clothing called Hiten and over it will make this cloak in ancient Greece it was called Glamis let's start with a hit on that let's focus on this window on the right where we'll create our patterns marvel's designer actually works the same way as if you were cutting and suing together a real piece of clothing so you always have various shapes of fabric and by defining their shape and connecting their sides and corners together you form a garment in our case let's not make it too difficult so let's just click on this rectangle tool here and drag it over the silhouette of our model like this this way you've created your first piece of fabric and it immediately appears here as you can see you can start playing with the shape of this fabric so let's hit this edit pattern tool and drag this bottom corner up like this you can see that the shape changes in the 3d viewport as well now I don't want this piece to be just a rectangle I want the shape to taper a bit up here around the neck so what we can do is hit this add point icon here and with it add two new points here now you can grab the points and push them closer together like this and also with the add point tool add two points up here as well I want to have here a little curved hole made for the neck so grab another tool this one is called edit curvature you can activate it with the C key and drag this segment down like this cool now we have our basic shape more or less done of course now we have created just a front part of our kitten what we want to do is symmetrically copy this front part and mirror it over to the back fortunately Marvelous Designer has a tool that does just that so just right click on your piece of clothing and click symmetric pattern emerge copy is now created now I remember that in the beginning I had a hard time wrapping my head around the fact that I create some pattern here in the 2d pattern window and it is also created in the 3d viewport but when I start moving it here it doesn't move in the viewport think of it like a UV editor where if you move an island it doesn't move the geometry either so here on the right side we create shapes and these stages the same all the way and now here on the left we simulate those shapes and watch all the physics happen which I will show you in a moment so after you symmetrized your pattern go into the 3d viewport click on this new piece of fabric and with your manipulator push it behind the character like this by the way I have my manipulators set to world settings so they do not rotate along with your camera which is unbelievably stupid if you ask me so if you encounter this know that you have to switch to world coordinates up here in the preferences and gizmo option awesome with there done time to fire up the magic in this case it's called simulate the magical simulate button of Marvelous Designer yes if you hit this button or the keyboard shortcut spacebar well in this case stuff just falls down but that's just because we haven't connected any of our fabric parts together so that it hits the body and sticks to it so first of all hit spacebar again to stop the simulation and then hit control Z to return it to the default state by the way anytime I activate the simulation mode this icon will glow yellow like this now let's go back to the Thule pattern window and hit this segment sueing button this will allow us to connect our two parts together and just like it says it will stitch them together along the edges I want to have an open segment here for the hands to go through but I want to connect the sides of the heat on so that they wrap around the body so with the segment sueing tool keyboard shortcut and by the way just click here on this top part of the segment here and then on this part and connecting lines like these should appear do the same thing on the other side and now if you hit spacebar to simulate well something's definitely happening stuff is connecting midair but it's still not sticking to the body because we haven't connected it up here again and for sewing tool and connect these two edges on both sides be sure you are clicking on the same side of the edges not a cross because then your stitching might get crossed and create a mess let's see what happens now hit spacebar and I always want to make this sound when the parts connect together this sorry anyway we can do better here so disable the simulation mode with spacebar hit control Z and let's add one little thing that will bring everything together and that is an internal polygon line I know it doesn't sound too exciting but bear with me just click on both sides of this pattern here around the waist area and by the way since we've created our pattern symmetrically it automatically draws the line on the other side too now this line by itself doesn't do much but if you check this elastic button here well that's a different story this elastic option basically brings the cloth together as if there was some sort of rubber band the idea is that later I will put a belt on this waist so that this folded bit will be hidden beneath it let's just quickly raise the strength and lower the ratio here which makes the effect a bit stronger now one thing that we can also do with the simulate mode active is with your regular select tool which you can activate by hitting Q is to manually play around with the fabric you basically can wrap it push it where you want it the whole thing will simulate and you can experiment like this however you want this is what makes Marvel's designer so much fun this ability to quickly stretch and tuck your folds in any place I also lowered the ratio of the elastic line a bit more to about 15 and I decided to select the line hit control C control V and paste a duplicate of it a little lower this way I created a bigger shrunk area around the waist which gives me more space for the future belt of course you can also create a belt in Marvel's designer but this tutorial is supposed to be basic so let's just keep things simple a bit of further pushing and pulling in the simulation mode here and also one awesome thing about Marvel's is that even after you sim do your garment you can still change the shape of the pattern so you're free to go back here hit the edit pattern button at Kesey by the way and change the shape however you want you what I also decided to do was to narrow down this neck part as well simply drag your points around then hit spacebar and stuff will Reece immolate and anytime you think the clothing needs a manual help don't hesitate to go in and fluff it like this that's what the software is all about one thing you can do to to change the behavior of the fabric is to go to this fabric menu up here click on the fabric one and scroll down until you find this menu here you can pick from all sorts of fabric types so let's change ours to linen for example since in ancient Greece they used it a lot and you can see that when we hit simulate the clothing readjusts itself the behavior of linen is slightly different now you can of course experiment with the settings here manually as well so yeah do that now to actually have our hit on animated along with our character all we have to do is switch to this animation tab and hit this red camera button here and all you have to do is just wait for the software to compute the result easy peasy and you can of course then just go to simulation tap hit spacebar and adjust your clothing further with the move tool one thing you can see though is that the fabric has a habit of returning to its original shape I really wanted to stick to this concrete spot on the shoulder since that's how men in ancient Greece bore their sleeves so let's introduce another tool this one called pin for the pin to be usable you basically shape the clothing to your desired shape for example like this then immediately stop the simulation with spacebar and click on the pin tool now just select a few polygons you want to stay pinned and here we go they won't budge an inch now the process fold your fabric however you want it stop the simulation paint polygons where you want them and then simulate again if you don't like the way you pinned your polygons you can always use the pen tool again hold down ctrl and select the polygons you already pinned and they will get deselected you can then play around with your fabric some more pinned some new polygons and stick them to the place you've chosen now let's use this pin option to create a cloak or klamath for our character this is very easy but surely you know and in character with cloak is immediately 100% cooler so yeah it's very very handy it's pretty much like falling leaves or birds in the sky that make your shots always much more epic which is something I talk about extensively in my new course making a short film teaser in blender so don't forget to check that one out if you want to make your own Eevee scenes and videos now simply create a new rectangular shape let's quickly move it behind the character show up here and then in the 3d viewport in the two corners of it and the thing is now that the polygons are pinned if you hit spacebar for the simulation mode you can move them around however you want so our goal now is to move them both on the neck of our avatar so just move them around pull on the fabric if need it and play with it until you get a shape you like I'll actually speed up my clumsy process a bit here it's so satisfying to watch right I love the way the fabric moves and simulates in 3d space what you can do at this point if you want to change the behavior of your cloaks fabric is to create a second fabric type in this window here select the klamath and change the type down here then in the fabric two settings used for example this silk preset or other wool presets anything you like really and you can see the behavior of the fabric changing with the different presets you choose the end I went with the wool coat weight preset at one point I then edited the shape of the pattern a bit more made it longer and also trimmed it up here then I just continued the process of pushing the to paint polygons and pulling on the fabric until I was satisfied with the result one additional note here an edge of your garment pattern can be made elastic just selected with the Edit pattern tool shortcut z and activate the elastic option here and then again increase the strength and lower the ratio until you are happy with it now some more pushing and pulling and let's get this fabric out of the hand of our character that's very important and you can push it behind the character like this you one thing you can do to maybe simulate a bit of wind or a force pushing the fabric is to use this pressure option here well don't go overboard with it or you'll end up like this if you manage to completely mess up your garment you can always go here and hit reset 3d arrangement but it's not really necessary here just pull on the fabric and get it back to the previous shape and with the pressure set to negative one it's actually as if very low force pushed it away from the body so it behaves a bit more floaty now you cool the very last thing we'll do here is to hit this remesh button it actually does quite a decent job of creating a nice-looking rectangular topology instead of a total mess of triangles now just shift select all the parts of your garment hit file export and obj selected and you can safely ignore everything now the only concern might be the scale of the thing and we will adjust that in blender quite easily so back to blender now here simply import your obj scale it to its place 0.1 worked for me to improve the look you can smooth the normals it controlled - for smoothing the geometry and also with proportional editing activated by hitting o push-and-pull various areas where the geometry might protrude also before adding textures you can lay out the UVs which are however pretty much laid out for you from Marvel's designer so just select the regions and pack them here I actually went in textured the garment in substance painter very quickly and it's some belt and little accessories but that's a topic for another time so my friends I hope I've picked your interest and introduced you to the wonderful tool called Marvel's designer in a quick and easy way and as you can probably tell by the huge amount of icons and menus we haven't covered this tool is much much more complex than what I've shown you here so ya can't recommend it enough but it's quite enough for today see you next time and Martin out

Channel: Martin Klekner

Views: 428,251

Keywords: blender, marvelous designer, marvelous, clothing, fabric, cloak, ancient, greek, chiton, chlamys, simualtion, sim, cloth, seam, garment, dress, cape, introduction, fundamentals

Id: Rp1G9mIBskI

Length: 22min 20sec (1340 seconds)

Published: Tue Jul 23 2019