Marvelous Designer - how diffi…
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Marvelous Designer - how difficult
agate888
Posts: 29
in The Commons
I have used a variety of 3D tools, not really an expert at any of them, but know how to use. Never used Marvelous Designer, and wondering how difficult it is to use? I need to create clothing for some original characters, and can't find the right clothing. From 1-10, 1 being easy and 10 hard, how difficult is MD?
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To do something basic - say a simple skirt - it's about a 2 out of 10 in difficulty. Just need to learn how to visualize which way the sewing lines should go. To make very eleborate clothes with laces and the like it gets complex. But for most things it's very easy. You draw some shape outlines, select edges to sew together, line the shapes up on top of the 3d avatar, and press simulate, and bang you have a shirt or a skirt or whatever. I suggest you search youtube for Marvelous Designer and watch a few vids of people making clothes, many of them are pretty quick.and you can see that it's pretty simple in concep.
You can find lots of lessons on Youtube. Watch any lesson for newbies and answer your qwestion.
For me Marvelous is 1 and Zbrush is 10.
Yeah i would say its pretty easy in comparison to most other software packages in the 3d spectrum.
One thing that might take a bit to get your head around is that it basically simulates how clothing is made in real life. I.e you start with 2 dimensional patterns that are sewn together in the same manner as they would be in real life. Without looking at real life or MD examples of what shape/size the 2d patterns should be to achieve the kind of garmet you are trying to create, it can take a lot of trial and error to achieve the look that you want
...that is the reason I like it was I was in theatrical costuming in college and it just seems more intuitive to me. (I have a very old version that is out of the upgrade loop).
That said I received an email the other day which announced that beginning with MD 10 it is going totally subscription based. Bugger, I've been trying to save for a personal perpetual licence for ver. 9 but likely won't make it before version 10 is released.
Hmmm... seems like a last opportunity before late Nov to grab the personal perpetual for $490 then take the time to learn the software.
I bought a real life Simplicity pattern to help me "learn to sew" so I could use MD easier.
i would say 2/10 difficulty wise. Pretty easy to use and it's a very simplistic program, meaning that you are really only working with a few basic principles and a few basic tools.
Because it is simulation based, and based on a real life sewing concept, it's very intuitive to understand.
The only difficulty is learning how to properly fit clothing (if you dont have a sewing background.) I found Daniel's videos on Youtube helpful for learning how to fit clothing properly.
With a 1 year prepaid subscription (for non-commercial personal use) at $280, the question is, will you, each and every month, use MD to make $23 worth of clothing (that you can't buy pre-made already)? You can buy an awful lot of clothing at DAZ for $23, considering the PC+ pricing and the many excellent value sales. If you are an artist that needs 3D clothing that is so exceptionally unique that you can't find it to buy on the Internet, and you need this custom clothing each and every month, then it's worth the $23 a month. If you miss a month of creating something unique, then your next garment is going to cost 2 months membership - that is - $46. If you don't care about expense and you just want to play around with the MD software for fun, then it may be worth $280 of fun for you. I, personally, wouldn't get enough use out of the program to pay more than $5 to $7 a month for it.
Yes, 3D modeling is expensive hobbie. Don't forget about Maya, Zbrush, Photoshop...
God bless Blender and Daz Studio!
I have never tried ZBrush so can't compare it to ZBrush, but for me, DAZ Studio is 1, Marvelous Designer is 2 and Blender and Maya are both 10.
...true, but so much clothing content here and in the other store tends to be "sexy" which is what sells. Furthermore so much new clothing content is dForce, which doesn't work well with my old system.
For an old Sci Fi story idea I've been dusting off, much of the clothing for the various cultrures involved is pretty unique and will need to be created from scratch as pretty much littel to nothing in the store here comes close to the many old sketches and drawings I have.
Oh and annual subscriptions are now 300$ while monthly ones are 50$
Not to dissuade anybody from buying MD but as to how difficult it is to use ... in other forums they mention the learning curve to be about one year. They also mention the need to learn how to design clothing. So that to me does not sound particularly easy, etc. and for a year's learning curve there is Blender. I haven't mastered it [not likely to happen anytime soon} BUT it apparently can also be used to 'sew' clothing together. There are a few very interesting tutorials over on YouTube.com showing how.
I made my white tie outfit with MD with experience from only Daz Studio and Hexagon. I found it very intuitive and managed to finish "sewing" the suit up in the first 3 weeks (the rigging in DS is totally different story XD). I recommend MD, it's a very powerful software!
I found it impossible to learn in the trial I had so yes it varies a lot by user
I use lots of software and even Blender stitching and simulating cloth was easier for me to grasp
I've found the cloth sim in MD to work like Black Magic while Blender is finnicky and requires lots of tinkering with settings. And MD runs on the GPU, very important for those doing animations.
This gentleman has used MD and has a Blender sewing tutorial as well.
The one thing I never liked about MD is that you can't create perfectly symmetrical clothing, due to its physics simulation. That can only be done in a 3D modeller app.
MD may be perfect for you then. But as for there being a lack of conservative (non-sexy) clothing, that isn't true. You may have to look for it, but it is in the DAZ and other stores. There are not a whole lot of style variations with conservative clothing - in 3D or in real life. The list of clothing items is real short. Men have been wearing the same basic wardrobe for at least 50 years - t-shirt, polo shirt, business shirt, short sleeves, long sleeves, jeans, athletic shoes, boots etc. And women have the same limited selection now. And in my opinion, 99% of people you see on the street or at the mall are wearing nothing but a jumble of miss-matched ill-fitting, off the rack stuff - pieces of track-suits, miss-matched pieces of denim, formless nylon jackets, leggings with absurd and ugly patterns, cheap pleather ripp-offs of designer handbags, $5 scarves, old running shoes, There's also available a good selection of 3D business clothing for both men and women. But you're right, if you need highly unique SciFi wear that matches your sketches, MD was made for you.
I was wondering, how about military uniforms? Can military uniforms be created in it? Especially uniforms with a "full" collar blouse, not with a blouse open at the neck and showing a collared shirt with a tie? Can collar pads and other insignia pads/patches be created in it too?
MD is pretty easy to use and very fast to view results, like all "support" software (because you will use it for complementing DS) there is a bridge to learn when transition from MD to DS
for me MD= 1...
...ZB is 3.
no idea what youre talking about but i assume the answer is yes - anything that is fabric can be modelled pretty easily.
https://www.artstation.com/marketplace/game-dev?q=marvelous+designer§ion=latest&page=10
I am talking about a very different esthetics style than the modern US uniforms, which seems to be the almost exclusive style available. Something akin to the Austro-Hungarian style:
This. Marvelous tutorials took me about 20 minutes to start to create some basic clothes. Zbrush on the other hand took an 30 minutes to even understand one button.
You can piece together uniforms that look like that using pre-made content from DAZ and that other store. That other store has a vendor who makes Napoleonic style uniforms, and one that makes German uniforms of WWII. The hats are like modern marching-band caps. The coat is like this https://www.daz3d.com/dforce-tundra-wanderer-for-genesis-8-male
You would need to re-texture the pieces, but you need to texture pieces from MD too.
If you're looking for exact military styles from some precise battle, you could probably do it in MD. If all you need is a style that is suggestive of an existing uniform, you can probably cobble it together by kit-bashing.
https://www.daz3d.com/dynamic-uniforms-for-michael-4-genesis
https://www.daz3d.com/military-dress-uniform-for-genesis-3-male-s-and-genesis-2-male-s
https://www.daz3d.com/uniforms-for-michael-6
well yes you can make an outfit like that.
...unfortunately a good deal of it is for older generations and doesn't autofit very well. Gen4 skirts in particular tend to develop a distortion in the centre which stretches the texture. Even with third party fitting tools and fitting clones, older clothing doesn't always translate very well (particularly footwear) without a lot of extra tedious manual fitting that impacts the workflow. Most of the new clothing content is also Gen 8 (I primarily work with Gen 3) and uses dForce which takes way too long on on my old hardware.
Simpler to just create from scratch wth MD and rig for Daz..
I know of these, but something less outdated, made for Genesis 8 would be great. And working with the A-pose, rather than the T-pose. While I have the Michael 6 set, and it looks awesome, I have yet to manage to put those uniforms on a Genesis 8 figure due to the base pose incompatibility. The smaller items are great, though.
I have the Military Dress uniform, but still, that is not exactly the same esthetics style. By the way, the three gentlemen on the image I posted were the top brass, so to say. The top of the top. They are still wearing field uniforms, though.
As for the Michael 4 and Genesis set, I still have to find out how well such an old set would fit on a Genesis 8. I do not own it yet.
Oh well. I guess I am going to have to watch some videos about MD and maybe try to figure out whether trying to put together something (at least like a blouse) in the free month long trial would even be doable, or if MD is too far beyond my skills. Making the MD items usable in Daz Studio might be a whole different animal too.
MD used to have a free trial version - they may still offer it. I tried it and it was a pain in the neck to use (but that was an older version).
Yes, there is a one month long free trial on offer there. Still this may be way beyond my skill level.