Marvelous Designer Beginner Course - Part 1 - The Basics

hi everyone very vague here and this three-part tutorial series i'm going to be taking you through from start to finish how i created this skateboard animation using marvelous designer and blender and so the way in which i'm going to structure this course is firstly in this part i'll take you through all the basics of marvelous designer and demonstrate what i think are the most important features in the program so the goal here won't be to make something pretty rather it'll just be to get you to have a play around so you're feeling confident and familiar with the ui and tools so it'll very much be geared towards people using the program for the first time but even if you have used marvelous designer before i'd still recommend to follow along as i'm sure you'll pick up some new tips and tricks along the way then for the second part we'll put our newly learned skills into practice and create the skater outfit itself by making some top and bottom garments from reference images and mood boards i'll also go over how we can add in additional accessories to our outfit like bum bags hats and so on and then finally for the third part we'll run our cloth animation sim and then export this into blender so we can add some more realistic materials and lighting to it before rendering and just quickly before we get started all the assets and resources we'll be using throughout this course will be available to download on my gumroad or art station here which i'll link in the description below so this will also contain all the finished project files as well as template files i use across all my projects so i'd highly recommend downloading it and it's also obviously a great way of supporting me to keep making these videos for free on youtube which i'm a pretty heavy advocate for as i really believe everyone should have equal access to education no matter your background so youtube is great for this so we'll get started and go ahead and open up marvelous designer from my desktop and just for reference i'm using marvelous designer version 9 but everything we go over should be available in the other versions as well as clo 3d which is fundamentally the same program so the first thing we're going to want to do is import our avatar which will act as the virtual mannequin for our close to sit on so we'll go up to our main toolbar go into file then import then alembic because this is what our particular file type is in this case and then select our preferred model i've included two files in the folder which are a basic walk cycle and a skateboarding animation like in the render i showed earlier i'm just going to go ahead and use the same skateboarding avatar so we'll choose this one and then just ensure these settings are the same as mine here with the units set to meters and the frame rate set at 30 before pressing ok and now you see we've got our avatar in a simple t-pose ready for us to model our clothes on so if you've never used marvelous designer before you might be wondering how i'm moving around here so for the view controls i'm using shift right click to pan around and right click to orbit but i think by default this might be middle mouse button so if you want to change these you can do so by dropping down the settings option on the main toolbar and then select the user settings option then if we go into the view controls tab you can see we can change these to whatever we please so feel free to use mine here or just change these to whatever works best for yourself so just to go over the basic ui of marvelous designer as you can see we have our two main viewports here the 3d viewport on the left and the 2d pattern window on the right so we'll do most of our 2d pattern creation and layouts here on the right and then all our simulation and 3d positioning here on the left we then have our two main toolbars above each mostly corresponding to the tools you can do in each viewport but there is a bit of crossover then lastly on the right we have our fabric and properties tabs or windows which i'll go into in more detail in a second we can move on to going over some of the basics of marvelous designer and how we can start to create our first garment first let's start by looking at one of the most important tools which is the shape tool so to use this tool we'll go to the toolbar above the 2d pattern window and select the one labeled polygon and then if we hold this button down we'll get a drop down that allows us to choose from a range of shapes like rectangle or ellipse but for my example i'm just going to go ahead and use polygon so for the polygon mode we just simply left click around to make different control points for our shape and i'm just going to make this roughly cover the head of our avatar and we can add bezier curves instead of just standard straight lines by holding in left click and then dragging to we're happy with the shape of the curve and release and then we can close out our shape by coming back to our first point and clicking and now we'll get a solid pattern ready for simulation we can then use the transform pattern tool to move this around in the 2d pattern window and scale or rotate it so to position this in the 3d viewport we'll want to use our gizmo or gimbal so this should come up automatically when you click on the pattern in the 3d viewport and i'm not really sure why the folks at marvelous designer would do this but i think by default the control access for this is set to by view which basically means it will kind of orient these arrows depending on your viewpoint which i found to be quite tricky to use so to change this we can go into preferences on the main toolbar and select gizmo and then change this to local coordinate and now we can see these arrows will stay in the same direction whichever way we look at it with that setup we can now rotate this pattern and position it above our avatar's head ready for simulation so for the simulation itself it's quite simple we just go up to the simulate icon here in the top left above the 3d viewport and if we hold it down you'll see we get a range of options so depending on your computer specs here gpu will most likely result in the quickest simulations but cpu even though it will take a bit longer will give us much more physically accurate results so this is the option i tend to use most often and the last two are essentially just cpu but with more resources allocated so i tend to only use complete for the final animation which we'll go over a bit later in the tutorial and now i'm just going to hit the button to run the simulation and we'll see our garment is now on our avatar's head so straight off the bat i can see the garment is much smaller than anticipated so i'm going to stop the simulation then hit ctrl z to undo and now i'm just going to scale this up using the transform pattern tool as we went over before and then re-simulate so now simply by using left click and drag we can pull and tug the garment into place until we're happy with it and this really is what i find to be the most powerful part of marvelous designer is the ability to play around like this with our garment in real time and obviously the more complicated our garment gets the slower this simulation will become but i find for the most part it's always pretty manageable to work with moving on one of the most important things to stay on top of in marvelous designer is to ensure our simulation resolution is correct per garment so as you can see here it's already looking a bit low res with our ear sticking through so to get a better view of what our current resolution is we can go into our toolbar here in the 3d viewport and change the fabric viewing mode to mesh and now we can see the wireframe of the resolution of our mesh so to increase this let's first select our garment and then under the simulation properties in the right hand windows property editor let's change the particle distance from 20 to 10. so by default this is always going to be set to 20 but we'll want to change this value per garment depending on how millimeter perfect we want it to be i'd say on average i mostly don't put this value lower than 10 but if you're working on something very intricate you might want to go into the single digits but keep in mind this will increase simulation time the lower you go so now if we change back to textured surface viewing mode and then re-simulate we'll see we're getting a much cleaner result next we'll look at editing the actual fabric itself that is assigned to our garment so to do this we'll want to go into the object browser in the right hand window and then select on the fabric we want to edit in this case fabric 1 once selected we'll get an orange outline come up around our garment to show that we're in fabric edit mode which will change all our settings in the property editor to the material settings and now we can go in and change things like the color texture and thickness of our fabric so i changed mine to a violet color so we can see it a bit clearer and then i'm going to give it a thickness of about three millimeters and if you notice that this doesn't change the appearance of the thickness in the 3d viewport like mine's not it's probably because we're not in the correct fabric viewing mode so to change this we'll go into the same viewing mode toolbar we did before and change this to thick textured surface and now we'll see we're getting that showing up correctly next we can change the physical preset assigned to our fabric so this is sort of like an additional layer on top of our simulation settings we went over before but this time rather than controlling the resolution it's going to control the actual material type by which it's going to try to approximate in the simulation so to give you an example here if we were to go in and set this to something like silk and simulate we'll see suddenly our garment has become much more loose and flexible whereas if we were to do the same thing but this time selecting leather cowhide we'll see our result is much more rigid and heavy so continuing on i'm just going to select my preset to be cotton canvas which is one of the most commonly used presets and will serve us for the purpose of this demonstration next we're going to go over how we can start to add in some detail to our garment so the first thing we might want to look at doing is cutting a hole in this piece and there's a few ways to do this so if you're from a more typical 3d background you might find it more intuitive to do it in the 3d viewport itself so for this method we'll select our line 3d pattern tool and then proceed to just draw roughly around the head shape of our avatar and then close the line out and we'll now see we have our corresponding shape in the 2d pattern window here but we can't actually edit this yet so to turn this into a proper internal shape we have to go back to our 3d viewport this time selecting the edit line 3d pattern tool and then with all our edges selected using ctrl a we can then open up the quick menu by clicking middle mouse button in my case and choose convert to internal shape and now that that's a proper internal shape we can cut this out by again selecting the shape in the 2d pattern window open up our quick menu and select convert to hole then if we now simulate this we'll see that our garment deforms accordingly but it's not really giving me the result i wanted which can sometimes be the case when we use this 3d line method of cutting so we could just go in and edit the points in the internal shape so it fits better but rather than do that i'll show you the other more efficient method for doing this style of cutting so i'm just going to delete this hole and then come up here to my internal polygon line tool drop down and select internal ellipse we'll then create our ellipse by left-clicking inside our garment and dragging it to we're happy with the size we can then reposition this using our transform pattern tool and then i'm just going to delete this previous shape that we don't need anymore we can then repeat the same process we used before by selecting on our ellipse and converting it to a hole through our quick menu and now simulating we can then just pull and tug this to a happy with how it's sitting on our avatar and just for the purpose of demonstration let's say we weren't happy with our simulation and we wanted to somehow reset our garment we can do this by again selecting our garment opening up the quick menu and this time selecting reset 3d arrangement and now with that reset we could move it into place using the gizmo making sure we're in select move mode and then re-simulate so now that we're happy with how that's sitting on our avatar we could go in and make adjustments to our initial shape if we wanted to by going up here above the 2d pattern window and choosing the edit pattern tool we can then simply click and drag our points to reposition them or get rid of unnecessary ones by pressing delete another great tool i like to use is the smooth curve tool which allows us to drag on our points and turn straight edges into beveled ones and then if we needed to potentially add more points to a particular edge of our garment we can go up here and choose the add points split line tool so all these changes will be approximated in our 3d viewport while we're editing but to get the proper accurate result we'll want to go ahead and simulate again next we're going to look at sewing which is how we can attach multiple garments together as well as creating new shapes from our existing garment so the easiest method to do this is to start by creating our new shape as an internal line i'm just going to choose internal rectangle and then drag this roughly to the size i want before then scaling and positioning it using the transform pattern tool then once in place we can open up the quick menu and select the option clone as pattern what this will do is create a copy of our shape but separate it from our existing pattern and create a new one what we'll then want to do is position this roughly in front of our original rectangle so we can clearly see what we're doing when we set up the sewing so for the sewing tools all of these are located above our 2d pattern window in this section here the first one we're going to look at and probably the most commonly used one is the segment sewing tool basically what this one's going to do is just sew by the edge or segment so as you can see as i hover over all the segments in my garment here i'm getting this blue line ready for sewing so we can go ahead and give this a try on our rectangle here by first left clicking on an edge of the separate one before then clicking on the same corresponding edge on our internal line and now what we should see are these clean parallel lines symbolizing that when simulated these two edges will be joined together now if you don't see these parallel lines and you're getting more of a jagged crisscross look like so it's because these two sections on the sewing edge haven't been lined up correctly so to fix this what we want to ensure is that when selecting each edge we select the same either upper or lower part of the edge so now i'll do it again making sure to select the top directional notch of each edge and now we'll get the correct result we'll then just repeat this process for the next two edges and then simulate and now we should have a nice rectangular pocket on the front of our garment so now using the edit sewing tool i'm just going to select the seams we just created and press delete so i can show you the other most common sewing tool which is the free sewing tool so this method works in a similar way except rather than sew each segment one by one we can just go in and trace around the whole edge we want to sew and then do the same for the corresponding internal one so yeah it's really up to you which one you prefer here but generally they do the same thing and then we also have a few other ones here if we hold on each of the drop downs you'll see we get the mn segment sewing tool and the mn free sewing tool and these pretty much work exactly the same way except they allow us to select multiple edges at once and group them before sewing them to the other side so i strongly recommend pausing here and playing around with all of these sewing tools until you feel relatively confident because i think it helps the learning curve of the program a lot as once you sort of understand the basics of sewing it will make everything a bit less daunting and in my experience ninety percent of the time a garment or outfit isn't simulating the way we want it's usually because of bad or incorrect sewing moving on we can start to look at other tools that allow us to add further detail to our garment we'll start with the cut and so tool which will allow us to do something similar to what we just created with our sewing tools so we'll create an internal rectangle this time on the pocket itself and then if we select on this and open up our quick menu we can now select the cut and sew option and as you can now see what's happened is it separated our shape and automatically sewn it to the pocket that we cut it off of so this comes in handy in a range of situations and what we could then also do is assign this detail a new fabric by going over to our fabrics window and press add now with our detail element selected we can then hit this assign button on the new fabric and voila this will now be assigned to it next we'll look at creating zips so let's say instead of this detail patch we wanted to change this to a zipper instead so we'll go ahead and delete this and then come up and select our zipper tool here above the 3d viewport now what we'll do is first left-click where we want our zipper to start and then double-click where we want it to finish we'll then repeat this process for the second edge making sure to click the points in the same order and then now we should have a nice looking zipper when we simulate we can even adjust the positioning of the zipper by selecting our select move tool and then dragging it open or close similarly we can also change the zipper type itself by selecting on it and then going into our property editor and adjusting these settings to your liking so now that we've covered the basics of zips we can also look at creating buttons for the first step we'll need to create a buttonhole for our button to attach to so to do this let's go up here and select the buttonhole tool before going into our 2d pattern window and left clicking on the area where you want your button to sit next we'll do the same thing but this time selecting the button tool itself and then simply click on the center of the buttonhole we just created and now as you can see when we simulate we have our button attached to our garment via the buttonhole and then just like our zipper we can change the shape and look of our button by coming over to the property editor and playing around with the settings here another handy tool that i often use is the offset as internal line tool this tool allows us to add detail lines based on existing edges of our garment by offsetting them so this can come in really handy when you're adding seams or trims to things or maybe you just want to change the material of a particular edge and so on to use this tool we'll first select the edge we're looking to offset before opening up our quick menu and selecting offset as internal line we can then enter our desired settings into this dialog box here so this is useful if you wanted to add multiple offset lines or you need to change the direction of the offset etc but for me i'm just going to keep these settings as is but change the distance from 5 to 10 millimeter and then press ok now with our new offset line selected we can then open up the quick menu and combine this with the cut and sew tool we went over earlier to create a color so i'm now just going to move this over here in the 2d pattern window and give it a new material by hitting the assign button in the fabrics tab then we can play around with the color of this by adjusting our settings in the property editor as we went over earlier next to give our garment that real extra bit of detail i'm going to add in some stitching so we'll find all our stitching tools located over here on our toolbar above the 2d pattern window and really the main one i tend to use is the segment top stitch tool here which is quite simple to add we just select it and then in the 2d pattern window drag over all the edges you wish to add stitching to and now as we can see if we zoom in we have all these rows of stitching that have been added so to make these bigger or to change the stitching type we can again go over here to our object browser and then in our top stitch tab with the default top stitch selected adjust our settings so for mine i'm going to change the shape to zigzag and then adjust the color here to black so it's a bit easier to see and now as you can see we've got some nice stitching covering all our internal and external edges now you might notice when we simulate this now that the stitching will turn off but don't worry that's just temporary from marvelous designer and we'll turn back on again once we stop the simulation and just another useful tool whilst we're on the topic of simulating is the pin tool which we can add by using the shortcut w so just to demonstrate this i'm going to move our garment up a bit here and then simply tap w on the spot we want to be pinned during the simulation and then simulate and now we'll see that's being held there nicely so this can come in very handy when working with complex garments and you might need to temporarily hold up a certain part of a fabric or something similar and then we can just remove our pin by again clicking w on the same spot so that about covers it for the basics and as you can see we've ended up with this beautiful contemporary poncho looking thing but hopefully now having made it you're feeling a bit more confident enough to take on putting some of these skills into practice and making something of your own but yeah i just wanted to reiterate that i think the key to understanding and progressing in marvelous designer is really just refining the basics as i don't think it's like some other 3d softwares where it's this kind of exponential learning curve that every time you learn one thing you learn those five other things that you now also need to learn rather it's just taking it step by step and as we've covered in this intro just going over each tool one at a time until you start to get your bearings with the program so in the next part we'll be putting our new skills into practice and making something a bit more typical in the form of jeans and a hoodie for this skater outfit but before then i'd really encourage you to repeat some of the steps we've just been over and maybe take 10 or 15 minutes or however long you want just to add in a few more things to this poncho until you're feeling ready and then i'll see you in the next one thanks for watching you

Channel: veryveig

Views: 34,270

Keywords: marvelous designer, clo3d, blender, skateboarder, digital clothing, virtual fashion, basics, tutorial, intro, 101, course

Id: eGi_NGSW3Zs

Length: 24min 19sec (1459 seconds)

Published: Wed Jul 07 2021