Marvelous Designer Archives

Creating Follower Clothing with Chaos Cloth in Unreal Engine 5.4

There is a neat way to turn static meshes into dynamic follower clothing in Unreal Engine! Since 5.3 there’s a Chaos Cloth plugin that ships with the engine, although it’s only really become usable in 5.4. It looks more complicated than it is, so let me walk you through the basic workflow in principle: Let’s …

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Importing animations from Marvelous Designer into Blender

I’ve been able to import Marvelous Designer animations into Blender for rendering! Here’s a short video I’ve tweeted showing my inflatable boat in action: This is how we make it happen in principle. In Marvelous Designer: animate your garment export an OBJ from the first frame export the animation as MDD using the same settings …

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How to change the distance between the garment and avatar in Marvelous Designer

Sometimes you might find that the body of the avatar is poking through the garment, and no matter how hard you try, it just doesn’t seem to go away. I’m assuming you’ve already tried lowering the particle distance on the garment and smoothed the avatar, and you still have small poke through artefacts. Perhaps try …

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How to trace patterns in Marvelous Designer

I’m getting back into MD (and a little CLO too), but it’s been a while since I’ve looked at the app so I’ll have to re-acquaint myself with some of the basics. Tracing patterns from images is one such thing I’ve never quite mastered, not until watching Lori’s new MD course about version 9.5. Here’s …

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How to fit DAZ Clothing using Marvelous Designer

In this episode I’ll show you how to use existing items of clothing and re-fit them to a other characters in DAZ Studio, using Marvelous Designer. Although auto-fit does work in many cases, it can also give extremely ugly results, and by having Marvelous Designer re-fit clothing, this can be greatly improved. https://www.versluis.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/How-to-fit-DAZ-Clothing-using-Marvelous-Designer.mp3Podcast: Download (Duration: …

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How to download previous versions of Marvelous Designer

Marvelous Designer (or Marvy D as some fans call it) receives frequent updates with a plethora of new features. With every round new version number, and upgrade fee is necessary – if you bought the software with a perpetual license (like I have, because I genuinely dislike the subscription model… but I digress).

This means that it is very likely that a new version passes you by, and you have the need to download an older version of Marvelous Designer.

Good thing you can: from the Download Archive.

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How to create symmetric patterns in Marvelous Designer

Symmetric Paste

Most 3D apps usually have some kind of symmetry function that allows you to make a change on the right side of the model, and as if by magic it appears on the left hand side of the model too. It’s an important feature to have.

Marvelous Designer works a bit different because we don’t “model” objects as such. Instead we create 2D patterns. So how can we tell the app that a pattern is symmetric?

There are two tools that can help us accomplish this tricky task: Symmetric Paste and Unfold. Let’s examine both options.

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Skeleton at the Graveyard

Yesterday I’ve animated this skeleton. The steps involved were rather complex, so I thought I’d better write down how I did it.

In principle, there are four parts to this animation:

  • the animation of the skeleton (using DAZ Studio and aniMate)
  • the cloth draping (using Marvelous Designer)
  • a moving fog layer (using Carrara)
  • a graveyard picture (from Graphic Stock)
  • and finally, blending it all together (in Premiere Pro)

Here’s how I did it step by step.

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How to export garment animations from Marvelous Designer for use in DAZ Studio

In my previous article I’ve explained how to export an animation from DAZ Studio and import it into Marvelous Designer, where we’ve created and animated our garment. In this article I’ll show you the reverse: exporting the garment with animation and import it into DAZ Studio for rendering.

Here’s how this works in principle:

  • export your garment animation from Marvelous Designer as OBJ Sequence
  • import the sequence in DAZ Studio using Morph Loader Pro
  • turn all those morphs into an animation

I’ve explained the whole process step by step in this video:

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How to export animations from DAZ Studio for use in Marvelous Designer

Exporting character animations from DAZ Studio for use in Marvelous Designer is a trifle complicated. In this article I will explain what works for me.

I’m using an animation created in DAZ Studio 4.7 using Michael 6, a Genesis 2 character. I will then create some clothing in Marvelous Designer 4.5, drape and animate it, and eventually export it back to DAZ Studio for rendering.

Here’s how to do it in principle:

  • bake aniMate blocks into DAZ Studio timeline
  • export OBJ file of your first animation frame
  • export the whole animation as MDD cache
  • import OBJ into Marvelous Designer
  • import MDD cache in Marvelous Designer
  • drape and animate cloth

I’ve explained the whole process step by step in this video:

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How to export a garment from Marvelous Designer

You can export your garment from Marvelous Designer either in OBJ or FBX format. Note that at the time if writing, FBX is highly experimental and appears not to work very well. OBJ on the other hand is doing a fine job. Head over to File – Export and choose OBJ. There’s also an option …

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How to import DAZ characters into Marvelous Designer

Screen Shot 2015-03-25 at 09.24.00Marvelous Designer comes with 7 default avatars, but it’s very easy to use your own 3D figure and create custom clothing for it.

Simply export your desired character as OBJ, including full body morphs, then import it into Marvellous Designer.

Here’s how to do with with the Genesis 2 Male character from the free essentials pack.

 

Exporting from DAZ Studio

Load your character into an empty scene and select it in the scene tab. It’s typically located on the right hand side in DAZ Studio.

Screen Shot 2015-03-25 at 09.31.21

Head over to File – Export and pick a location for your files: DAZ Studio will create a .OBJ and a .MTL file. It will also bring up an export dialogue in which you can specify the scale and size for your export. Those need to match the import dialogue of your other app.

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Navigating 2D and 3D Space in Marvelous Designer

Sometimes it’s the simple things they don’t to tell you about in the brochure: Zooming Magic Trackpad: move two fingers up or down, much like you would scroll a web page up or down. Intuos Tablet: hold the lower button down (right-click), then drag the pen. Mouse: rotate the wheel. Moving/Panning Hold the ALT/OPT key down, then: Magic Trackpad: drag …

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