How To Use Marvelous Designer - Beginner Tutorial

you I've had several requests for a marvelous designer beginner tutorial the trickiest part of making this video is addressing everyone in the audience I know that some of you are familiar with 3d such as blender my opposer or Daz some of you know 2d CAD like AutoCAD or QED CAD others are people that so in the real world that don't really have any 3d or 2d experience I've been all of you at some time in the past I learned how to sew very early in life and then I played around in the 2d CAD programs about ten years ago I did a lot of work in Maya as I introduced different parts of Marvelous Designer I will address each of these groups when appropriate I want you to be comfortable in the software and able to equate it to what you already know I don't think anyone has ever done a tutorial like this before but I think it will give all of you the confidence you need to tackle the program I watch a lot of tutorials both paid and free I'm a lynda.com subscriber and their videos are really professional I also watch YouTube tutorials made by people that don't have the best equipment and maybe not a lot of experience they all have their merits but there are some things that really bug me and I'm going to do my best to avoid them first I'm not going to tell you what the shortcut keys are when I'm learning something new shortcuts are the last thing on my mind I never remember them and they just serve to confuse me second I'm not going to say ctrl something on Windows and command something on Mac over and over again you're not stupid Mac users know to hit the command and Windows users know to use control my computer runs the Mac operating system but I use a Windows keyboard I will most likely refer to the Windows commands I know that a majority of my audience are Windows users so that should work out just fine the full written script of this tutorial is available over on the website the link is below in the description following along with the video is tedious and annoying when you're practicing you can watch the video and then use the script for reference as you practice as most of you know all of my tutorials and exercise files are offered for free if you find this tutorial helpful please go over to the fearless makers website and contribute a few dollars anything you can do would help out a lot with that out of the way let's get started I have a subscription to MD and that's the process that I'm going to describe your initial startup process may differ if you have the stand alone or Linux node licensing when you first open the program you'll be presented with a graphic options dialog box you have the options to show the shader use the shader and set anti-aliasing all of these take computer resources if you have a really slow machine you may consider turning off the shader options and selecting an low anti-aliasing option the first time out I would suggest you keep both shader options checked and select an 8 on the anti-aliasing if the program runs terribly you can always change the settings next time next the MD logo splash screen will display and you'll get the license manager box enter in your ID and password check the boxes to save these if you don't want to enter them every time you start the program I would strongly suggest that you check the auto deactivation box also for those of you who are new to subscription software I'll explain what deactivation means the deactivation process ensures that you are only running one instance of the program for your assigned ID and password this is how the software company makes sure you don't run their program on multiple machines concurrently or share it with friends if you had two machines you could deactivate the software on one machine and then you could activate it on the other one the auto deactivation is supposed to deactivate the software automatically when you close the program I will tell you from experience that doesn't always happen I downloaded a new version of MD installed it and was instantly locked out for 4 days it said that I had exceeded my licensing and I always leave the auto deactivation box checked the moral of this story is that you should understand what deactivation is and use it appropriately I will also show you how to deactivate the software in the program which is what you should do always before upgrading and loading a new version click the activate button to authenticate your credentials and open the program you will be presented with yet another dialog box titled avatar editor you can change the avatar properties like hair and shoes will close this for now and you can reopen it later from within the program before I forget the deactivate option is located in the top toolbar under settings before upgrading your software open the program and manually deactivate it just to be safe the program gives you a default avatar wearing a default garment we'll leave this here as we look at the interface the majority of the interface is two windows on the left you have the 3d window and on the right is the 2d window for the 3d folks you will have no problem with the 3d window you'll feel right at home over here also you should understand that Marvelous Designer is not a 3d modeling program I would better describe it as a physics program it applies gravity mass and wind to planes that are draped or pinned on the avatar the avatar is simply a collision object you cannot sculpt extrude or manipulate the geometry like you're used to this is a whole other ballgame so be prepared for those who sew with little or no 3d experience this window will be a challenge at first think of it as your sewing room with your dress form in the middle you can walk around the forum make adjustments to your garment and step back to take a look if I click on part of the garment this brings up the gizmo often called a manipulator in other programs I'm going to select preferences gizmo world coordinate now the gizmo will stay oriented to the 3d window space the gizmo will help you to understand the directions in 3d space the green arrow pointing up is the y-axis which moves up and down the red arrow pointing to the side is the x-axis which moves side to side the blue arrow is the z-axis and it moves front to back as you can see I can move pattern pieces using these arrows in the 3d window and constrain them to one direction this is very helpful when you're just starting out if I click the yellow box on the gizmo now I can move the piece in any in all directions at the same time this will get you into trouble really fast you can easily move a piece way out of alignment without intending to I would suggest that you keep its usage to a minimum I can use control Z to undo and put the pattern back to its original position you can pan zoom and rotate in the 3d window this allows you to navigate around the avatar and see things from every angle on the top main toolbar select settings user settings now select the view controls there's a small drop down up here in the upper right and you can see that I've changed my settings so it's set to a user preset yours will probably have the default preset selected you'll see that there are other presets for Maya 3ds Max and style CAD if you have experience in these other programs select one of these an MD will behave in a manner you are more accustomed to within the user settings view controls you can see what has been selected for each movement if you forget how to do any of these things just open this dialog box to get a refresher you may want to jot down the setting for each item right now I'm going to go ahead and just close this dialog the action of panning locks you in the X and the y-axis by default this is done by holding the middle mouse button you can move up and down and side-to-side and you can see that that cursor has turned into a little hand zooming is the left and right mouse buttons depressed or your scroll wheel the action of zooming locks you in the z-axis you can move forwards and back rotating is done by default using the right mouse button rotating spins the floor plane which is the grid at the avatars feet the center of the plane is the rotation point you can also tilt up and down while rotating all the buttons you see in the 3d window and directly above it apply to functions in the 3d window you can also right click in the window to bring up more functions when I first started out in 3d I was constantly losing my place I'd zoom or pan too far and completely lose my object this resulted in complete panic and I'd move around even more which would do nothing but compound the problem if you lose your avatar right-click in the 3d window and select zoom extents all this will bring back your avatar to centre view you can also lock your view to various planes right-click in the window and select front or front view you can do this for back left right top and bottom as well for the 3d people you will not use these views as much as you're doing other programs your pattern manipulation is not done in the 3d window so you won't find it necessary to lock orthographically as much as you do normally to our right we have the 2d window all the buttons at the top pertain to functions in the 2d space for those of you accustomed to CAD you will love the 2d window and be right at home here for those coming from 3d this window is very much like a UV editor the z-axis is gone all you have is X and Y for those of you that so think of the 2d window as your cutting table you lay out your patterns here and make changes to them you can zoom and pan in the 2d window obviously you can't rotate because there's no z axis now let's get rid of this garment to make our own and we could select all of the garments over here and just hit the delete button however all the custom fabrics and other settings that were associated with the garment would remain here and I think it's best to start fresh from the main menu select File new and we don't want to save this nd provides a silhouette of the avatar in the 2d window and gives us one basic default fabric let's do a quick simulation to get a feel for the program select the rectangle tool here on the 2d side many of the tools have two methods for using them I can click and drag in the 2d window to create my rectangle I'm going to hit delete to get rid of that I can also left-click to get a dialog box this create rectangle dialog allows me to enter very precise dimensions we'll just draw it a big rectangle right over the silhouette you'll note that I still have the rectangle tool active I can keep drawing rectangles all over to release a tool select the Edit pattern tool this is the equivalent of a neutral state and will keep you out of trouble even though I change tools my rectangle is still selected and that's why it's yellow to deselect it click anywhere outside the rectangle in the 2d window we now have four points connected with lines in between in the MD documentation they use point line segment terminology they don't refer to things as vertex edge or face so I'm going to use the MD terminology throughout the tutorial all points are connected to lines in MD you can't just create a point hanging out here by itself you can select a line and drag it anywhere you like you'll notice that as I drag MD is giving me very useful information it shows me the length of my lines and the distance from my old points to my new ones connected with a purple dashed line if I grab a point and drag it I get the same information you can manipulate your patterns by dragging lines or points those line links are really helpful so let's turn them on so that we can see them all the time right click in the 2d window and select show line length now next to every line in our pattern we have the length many times when you're moving a pointer line you want to constrain it orthographically that means we want to move locked at a precise angle to the starting position to do this you hold down the shift key while dragging you can't press the shift key then left-click drag you have to left-click drag just a little bit and then hold down the shift key I know it's a little strange but that's how it works this brings up purple dashed lines showing exact angles in each direction this option is not only available to lines but points as well and you'll see as I pull the point how it's snapping to these lines so I can get perfect angles you'll find this very useful so remember that this feature is here by default your 2d patterns are not in the 3d window you have to synchronize the two windows select the double arrow sync toggle and it'll turn orange and now our pattern is over in the 3d window you'll see that MD automatically applied the basic fabric to our pattern the pattern turned a gray blue color and we can see it over here now we have a big piece of pattern over in the 3d window and 3d users need to understand that patterns are always planes you don't get spheres cylinders cubes or any other type of geometry in here we select the pattern in the 3d window to display the gizmo you can also rotate the pattern using the circles on the gizmo the colors are coordinated the same as the arrows we can click the red circle to rotate in the x-axis we can use the y-axis to put this above the avatars head now let's simulate by clicking the gray downward facing arrow up at the top left you'll see that it turns orange and the simulation will begin when the pattern is where you want it click the arrow again to stop the simulation for those into 3d the 2d patterns are primitives with very minimal amount of geometry the 3d window applies a subdivision surface modifier automatically and you can adjust the density of the subdivisions now our avatar has a sheet over her head if we want to reset the position of the pattern to start over select the blue reset 3d arrangement all button up here it goes right back to where we started if you wanted her head to poke out you might think you could just drop the sheet down and then simulate this is a very bad idea what we've done is caused the avatar to penetrate the pattern which can result in all kinds of problems to see what we've done click this show Avatar button now she's disappeared and you'll see that the pattern did not rip it's still there and it's still complete never penetrate the avatar or any other model with the pattern intentionally we can put a hole in our pattern for the avatars head there are three buttons here with red shapes on them and these are all internal shapes they can only be drawn within the confines of a pattern you can't use them by themselves select the internal circle shape and draw a circle right on the pattern and now we can see our circle over here in the 3d window now I'll select the Edit pattern tool deselect the circle and zoom up you can see as I mouse over parts of the circle I get a small crossed arrow and a section of the circle is light it if I move into the middle you'll see that the crossed arrow is much larger if I click here I can select the entire circle and now I can move the circle wherever I like using the 3d window as reference we can place the circle exactly where we want at this point we've just created internal lines circle this is not cut out with the circle selected we right click and choose convert to hole now let's turn our avatar back on and we'll select the reset 3d arrangement all and now simulate and you'll see that as the simulation ran the fabric has some give to it and our circle isn't exactly how we want it to be so to change the size of the circle very easily we just select the transform pattern tool this tool is very different from the Edit pattern tool this tool allows you to move rotate and scale the selected shape so if I grab a corner here I can drag it down and make the circle a little bit smaller and once you have the shape how you want you can just hit simulate again and it'll close it up nicely you don't have to reset the patterns if you don't want to on complex garments I often do the work in stages I'll add pockets to simulated pants without resetting for example go ahead and use your 3d navigation tools to check out your work from all the different angles and you'll see here that we have some penetration and her hands her thumb is going through the fabric let's fix this MD allows you to interact with the pattern while it's simulating turn on the simulation then left-click and drag on the pattern see how I have a hold of it you'll see that there's a blue dot where I've grabbed the fabric and MD refers to this as a picking point I believe I refer to it as the blue dot but you can grab a hold of the fabric and eliminate any penetration that you might have this is a great way to get folds exactly how you want them as well you can pull and tug all you want on the fabric but don't get too aggressive with it there's physics at play think about what would happen if you pulled really hard on a real piece of fabric it's going to pull back when you release it and that's exactly what MD will do I think this is about as much fun as we're going to have with our little sheet there are several ways to save your work in MD select file save as to see the options for the most part you'll save as a garment or a project the project save includes everything including the avatar in the saved file the garment save includes the patterns and everything associated with them I typically save as a project so have everything later and don't need to worry about which avatar was used you may want to just save a garment file and bring it into a new avatar for resizing do whatever makes sense for each save so let's start on some sewing select our pattern and delete it we're going to draw it a little top for our avatar whenever you're creating patterns with two sides dropped out only one you'll see the advantage of this in a moment those of you who sew already know all about this we're going to select the polygon tool and click to place the points around the avatar silhouette make sure you leave plenty of room because this has to wrap around the body start at the base of the neck here in front hold down the shift key and go to the waist it's very important that this center front line is straight and true click to place key points around the body click on the first point to close the polygon all shapes must be closed rectangles and circles are automatically closed but you must close the polygons by clicking on the first point I'm going to switch back over to the the Edit pattern tool my pattern piece is already selected so I'm going to do ctrl C to copy the pattern and then I'm going to right-click and choose symmetric paste now I can hold down the shift key to keep this in perfect alignment to the original and just click to place symmetric paste is a relatively new feature in M D and it's a real powerhouse for 3d folks we just created a mirror modifier whatever we do to one of the pair will automatically happen to the other you'll have a beautifully symmetric garment when you finish with all your modifications even if your final goal is to create something that is asymmetric you should always start out this way it'll save you a lot of time now we need a back for the top let's reselect this original front here and do ctrl C select control V let's hold down the shift key to constrain it and let's drag this over to the far right now we're going to control C symmetric paste and let's drag this one over here to the left eye sync the patterns over here to the 3d window you'll see there's a little bit of a problem if I rotate around you'll see the front which is the right side for people who sew is a light gray the back or the wrong side is a dark gray our two back patterns are facing forward and this is the wrong direction to fix this right-click the pattern and select flip horizontally now our back patterns are in the correct orientation we could select each pattern piece and use the gizmo to place them around the avatar that's going to take a lot of time instead we'll use arrangement points hover your mouse over the avatar head and more options will be shown out to the right the second option is show arrangement points now our avatar has lot little dots surrounding her there are invisible shapes placed strategically around the avatar that define her shape with an offset hover over the avatar head again and select show bounding volumes now you can see those shapes the little blue dots are drawn on the shapes and they represent key positions around the avatar the blue dots inherit the shape of the bounding volume thereon let's turn off the bounding volumes so all we have left are the dots now let's select the back pattern piece on the far right rotate the avatar and select the second blue dot down from the shoulder you'll see how the pattern just jumped right into place if we rotate around we can see that the pattern is not flat it's conforming to the bounding volume that belongs to that dot if we turn the bounding volumes back on this becomes very obvious these dots called arrangement points will help you to place your patterns in the perfect starting arrangement and give this simulation a bit of a jump start always take advantage of them I should mention that you're not stuck with the MD avatars you can load your own models to use MD will allow you to create custom bounding volumes and arrangement points for your models we won't cover that in this tutorial just remember that you can do that let's use the arrangements points to place the rest of our patterns if any of the pieces overlap we want to use the gizmo to pull them apart if you have two patterns that will overlap in the final render stack them in the correct order when arranging try to make sure that none of your pieces penetrate other pieces or the Avatar patterns or collision objects just like the Avatar you can cause a mess with penetration during simulation if they overlap with other patterns or even themselves and I'm going to raise these back patterns up a little bit and drop the front you want the patterns up off the body so they have time to sew the seams before they drop down there are two tools used to sew seams seams are simply the joining of edges between two patterns a pattern and an internal shape or to internal shapes the first sewing tool is called this segment sewing tool it's a sewing machine with a little straight green line under it segments sewing joins two edges with each edge consisting of two points and a line connecting them the lines do not need to be the same length we'll start sewing here at the center front I just click both lines and we can see the seam here in the 3d window you can see their bread sewing threads coming across over in the 2d window you'll see that there are small lines up here that run perpendicular to the seam line these are called notches and they're always placed on the seam line closest to the starting point right now the notches are lined up properly let's sew the back seam next if you look over in the 3d window you can see the seam is not correct looking at the notches you can see that I have one at the bottom of the seam and one at the top I've crossed the scene this would be a total disaster if we try to simulate it like this this is really easy to fix select the Edit sewing tool and right-click the scene select reverse sewing now the notches are in the same orientation and if we look over here in the 3d window all the lines are straight now so we'll continue to use this segment sewing tool to sew up the side seams the shoulder seams and we're done now make sure that you don't close up the armhole and the neckline we can take a look over here and see all the seams are ready to be simulated we'll hit the simulate button MD is extremely forgiving and will stretch fabric as much as it can to avoid penetration this results in garments that are far too tight on the avatar they'll ride up and not look natural at all this is the most common mistake I've seen people make beginners and even advanced users after you have your garment on the avatar go up here and select show pressure points this tool shows you visually where there's pressure on the garment against the avatar and when it's red that means there's quite a bit of pressure so you can see that I've drafted this bodice a little bit too tight it's kind of red so we're going to come over here and I'm just going to move the centerline just a little bit on the front and I'm going to do the same thing for the back I'm holding down the shift key to keep it straight and I'm going to re simulate and now you can see all of the dots are blue which means that it's no longer too tight now we do have a little extra fabric back here but we'll take care of that in a moment the necklines and arm halls are very square right now let's make them curved a little bit select the Edit curvature tool click on the necklines and just drag them down now we want to do the same thing for the arm holes and now you can see the real advantage to the symmetric paste because I only have to change one side for it to show up on both let's take a look back here and it we just have too much fullness here in the back take a hold of this point holding down shift I'm going to drag it in just a little bit and there we go tightened it up I'm going to turn the pressure points off now I'm going to shorten the shoulder on the top I just use the Edit pattern tool and click a point and we can look over here in the 3d window to get it exactly where we want now you'll see that I do have a problem my front pattern piece is exactly how I want it but the back pattern seam is no longer the same length these two lines will need to be the same length to create a flat smooth seam if we scroll up we can see that my front shoulder seam is now six eight point six seven at the shoulder if I grab this point on the back and drag it and I'll probably never get it exactly right and I'll mess up the angle of the line in the process there's an easier way to accomplish this select the add point split line tool hover over the back shoulder line until it turns blue and right-click this brings up the split line dialog box this box allows us to split any line between two points you can split into two lines split by length or uniform split you can see the correlation between length 1 and length 2 down here MD is showing us the 6247 at this side of our point and the one 11.11 on the other side so we want the 111 side to be our 68 point six seven and then hit OK now we just have to select this old point and delete it the line is the perfect length to be sewn to the front now we also didn't change the angle the point that we deleted did define the curve so we can go ahead and select the Edit curvature tool and put our curve back take a look in the 3d window and hit the simulate button and you can see that we lost our seams when I made that change as well so we'll select the segment sewing tool and so those back up and hit simulate again so our front curve looks a little strange now so I'm going to fix that now I want to add a little sleeve cap to my top I'm going to use the add point tool to add a point in the armhole of the back and of the front and I'm just placing those by I'm not being real exact now you'll notice that these two segments that I've created are forty nine point seven three and forty nine point zero five together that's ninety eight point seven eight which is roughly a hundred and I want my sleeve cap to have a ruffle on it so I'm going to make it 200 wide I'm going to select the rectangle tool and left-click to bring up the create rectangle box I want my rectangle to be 200 millimeters wide and 90 millimeters tall and select okay switch back over to the Edit pattern tool ctrl C right click symmetric paste now I don't want these sharp corners on the edge of my little sleeve cap and if I just delete them you'll see that I lose the whole pattern I'm going to select the add point tool and right-click on the line and select uniform split now I can go ahead and delete those two points we could use the Edit curvature tool to drag these down and make nice curves but I actually prefer the Edit curve Point tool it allows us to see where the point is on line and click and drag to make our nice curves this looks pretty good but the curves are different and I want this piece to be completely symmetrical to do this I'm going to use the uniform split on the AB point tool and split the top line into two pieces now I switch over to the Edit tool and delete this corner now I can use the curve point edit tool to make this look exactly the way I want when I have it just right using the Edit tool I can click on this line to select it right click unfold now we have a piece that is exactly the same on both sides and if you don't like the curve you can simply delete the point again redraw it and then unfold we're going to use the arrangement points on the Avatar to place our little sleeve caps in the appropriate place and in and turnoff arrangement points so I'm going to rearrange the patterns a little bit over here in the 2d space get things a little bit closer holding down the shift key to keep them straight now we can use the blue dot to get our orientation so if I click we've got this sleeve cap and it's going to go to this area so I'll just move it down here so it's a little bit closer this time when we sew we're going to use the free sewing tool it's the little sewing machine with the squiggly green line under it this tool allows us to sew two edges together but it lets us decide where the seam starts and ends we don't have to sew from point to point we can also sell multiple pattern pieces together at the same time I'm going to start sewing here on the right hand side click and then I'm going to go all the way to the end and click now I need to sew this starting down here at our new point click hold down the shift key click at the top now the top of the back and down to the bottom release we use the Edit sewing tool and select the seams you can see that it split the sleeve cap into two parts and sewed half to each piece if you made a mistake just select the seam and hit delete and start over now when we go to do the other side you'll see that we have a bit of a problem the sleeve cap is not well-formed it's got this V in it it's all crooked what happened was this pattern piece was not placed square to the grid like this one was so when I did the unfold function it unfolded crooked and created this V we need to remove the symmetry if we delete right now it'll delete both of them so remove symmetry and delete now we'll take our original control-c symmetric paste and place it you can see that your pattern pieces if they are draped when copied will retain the shape that they had in the 3d window now we can repeat our sewing selecting the free sewing tool we'll start here on the left going to the right start at the front click hold shift click top of the back and there's that scene now all we need to do is simulate this was a pretty advanced scene and it was easy to do we attached three different pattern pieces all at the same time we also attach the longer line to a shorter line on the front and back armhole that resulted in these nice gathers now let's make a simple skirt for our avatar using the skills that we learned with the sheet select the circle tool and left-click in the 2d window we want our circle to have a diameter of twelve hundred millimeters select ok now let's move this down and I'm using this grid cross to place it pretty close to the center now let's place an internal circle here in the middle using the Edit pattern tool I'm going to place it as close as I can to the center now we want to position the circle over here in the 3d window using the gizmo the arrangement points aren't going to help us with this one we're going to use the rotation tool and then push this back so it's roughly down at her waistline now over in the 2d window let's select our internal circle right click convert to hole now let's simulate and our skirt is not staying up on our avatar let's select the skirt right click reset 3d arrangement selected we can reset any pattern we want without disturbing the work we've already done this is really handy over in the 2d window let's select our circle and look over here in the property editor the property editor provides a list of all the properties associated with whatever you have selected right now it tells us information about our circle select the little checkbox next to elastic to turn it on you'll see that we have three settings in relation to the elastic we want this elastic to be pretty tight just to keep our skirt up so set the strength to 15 you can type in the box or use the little slider we'll set the ratio to 70 now we'll come over here and simulate again the elastic property took over and pulled the circle up tight against her waist now we just need to grab a hold of this skirt and pull it out of our hands you might find it helpful to grab it and hold it in certain positions so you can get the nice draping that you're looking for now our avatar has a nice little top and a skirt in the process you've learned how to use many of the tools available in MD I think this is a good place to stop this beginner tutorial you have enough information to play with the program and not become frustrated with the interface obviously there is much more to MD and this is only the beginning of your adventures with the program I have lots of other tutorials that are more advanced and you should check those out when you feel you're ready to move on I'm confident that you can master MD if you happen to know 3d 2d or how to sew in the real world all three skill sets are used in the program being familiar with any of them gives you an advantage thank you for watching thank you for taking the time to watch our videos please subscribe and you'll know it hit the like button to encourage us to make more if you have ideas for future videos please leave us a message in the comment section a message take care we'll see you next time

Channel: Lori Griffiths

Views: 752,814

Rating: 4.9246154 out of 5

Keywords: marvelous designer, 3d clothing, marvelous designer beginner tutorial

Id: Z1di8iIkDcE

Length: 48min 50sec (2930 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 09 2015