Love, Death + Robots Artist On Using Marvelous Designer

Introduction

Hello! I'm Diego Conte, a CFX Artist and 3D Generalist based in Madrid, Spain.

I became interested in the world of 3D early by looking at making-ofs and DVD extras of my favorite childhood films. After watching the making of the Lord of the Rings for the third time, I discovered a nifty piece of software called Blender (version 2.45) that I could actually install on the family PC (an old Mac with an excellent screen). Loved 3D ever since.

Thanks to many hours going deep into every tool in Blender, I went to college with better knowledge of 3D software than most. I was still lacking in fundamentals, of course, and even though I graduated as a Design major, I was missing a lot of skills on that front, too. Thankfully, right as I was finishing my degree, I came upon Ash Thorp and all the great work he does (which keeps inspiring me to this day). I was lucky enough to be mentored by him at Learn Squared, which was the catalyst I needed to start my career in entertainment.

Although I'm grateful to work on many (and very different) projects, I think the ones that are probably best known to the reader are some of Alberto Mielgo's short films, including The Witness for Netflix's Love, Death + Robots and The Windshield Wiper, which went on to win an Oscar for Best Animated Short Film back in 2022. I was the CFX supervisor on both short films, in charge mainly of cloth simulations for characters and props.

Getting Started With Marvelous Designer

I've used Marvelous Designer extensively in production, both for pattern making and even final simulations.

I remember being very surprised by the software workflow when I first saw it being used. I must credit here Ina Ortega, an incredible modeler I worked with back in my first industry job. That real-time nature of the software and the way you get so many realistic details for free was a breath of fresh air compared to more traditional modeling.

About learning it, I must admit, I learned most of it during production. I had some fundamentals in place (thanks again to Learn Squared), but I was missing a lot of the nuance that only comes when you use the software every day for a while. Because the process was so organic, though, I was able to approach it from a place of curiosity first, which I think is always the best way to do it. Throw some cloth around and play, keep it fun. You can always get more technical later.

The Marvelous Designer Experience

Marvelous Designer's toolset is concerned mainly with drawing flat patterns for garments (as it would be done in real life by a tailor or a fashion designer) and then sewing and draping those patterns on a character body or avatar. The 2D toolset of Marvelous is close to what you would find in regular CAD software (think Autocad or Illustrator), while the 3D side is closer to your regular DCC, with the main feature being how fast simulations are and how organic and direct the edits become, with the ability to pull the cloth around with your mouse at any time.

The pipeline is fairly straightforward. You import your avatar from your main DCC using any of the standard formats, and you start by drawing the patterns in the 2D view. You sew and drape these patterns to create the garment. The process can be fairly non-linear, as you go back and forth editing the 2D view while Marvelous updates the 3D view in real-time.

Beyond drawing tools, my favorite tools must be pins and tacks. I can't overstate how much can be done with these tools. They are fairly simple constraints, and yet, they are so easy to set and so stable that they are, most of the time, the best solution for complex drapings (like a tucked-in shirt).

For people who want to get serious about using MD, the main skill to master is pattern-making. It's not an easy skill, it requires lots of spatial vision, practice, and research. Thankfully, though, it's not an industry-exclusive skill, so there are plenty of fashion and pattern-cutting books to learn from. Beyond learning the basics, these books are a treasure trove of references that come in very handy, both for realistic and stylized projects. Humans have been making clothes for 100,000 years, so we have some preconceptions about how patterns are built, and following these principles naturally leads to more realistic results. And, something to keep in mind, clothing, as a functional article, is not protected by copyright. So, you can copy and combine as much as you want, it's all good.

I have a realism bias in my approach to animated cloth, so even in stylized productions, I think of garments in a similar way and follow similar principles.

MD certainly allows for stylized garments to be made. They are more complex in the sense that they require more "pattern engineering" to fit the character. You would be surprised, though, how many times the solution to this fit problems to non-realistic body shapes actually can be found through research of real-life patterns. The workflow itself is the same, though, for the most part. I tend to use material presets that are a bit more rigid, but that is about it.

Integrating Houdini 

Indeed, Houdini has become indispensable as an assembly tool and of course, in many productions, as a simulation tool too. The main thing it offers is the ability to automate many tasks through proceduralism in the case of modeling tasks and through the ability to schedule and wedge simulations. Houdini can, in fact, perform fixes on simulations through its procedural toolkit that are not possible right now in MD. In production, we call this post-sim fixing, and it is a big part of the CFX job description (many times, you do more fixing than simulating, especially in difficult shots).

Houdini is a very good match for Marvelous Designer, in my opinion. MD's UX is amazing, and the organic way in which it works is, of course, its strength, but it doesn't have procedural, non-destructive capabilities at the core of how Houdini works. What it does have is fairly consistent outputs. You can expect Marvelous meshes to have certain features, topology wise, and that works great on the Houdini integration front, and it makes for a very happy marriage.

I would argue, though, that for a workflow concerned only with character creation, you might not need Houdini. If you only need to drape your garments to a static pose and maybe a couple of extra poses, Marvelous Designer works well enough (simulation quality is, in fact, better than Vellum out of the box in most cases). It's only when it comes to a character that will be animated and simulated for a couple hundred shots that Houdini becomes essential.

In this still frame of the short film The Windshield Wiper by Alberto Mielgo, both characters are dressed and simulated in Marvelous Designer:

Conclusion

I've been a teacher of the software for some years now, so I've seen many students becoming very good at the software. I'm a big fan of project-based learning. Either if you have a project going into learning the software or if you don't, I would try to always keep things practical and not get too caught up on the technical. For the most part, the tools you learn in a basic 10-minute introduction to the software are indeed the ones you will be using most of the time.

That said, I think the key factor that can get your garments from looking good to looking great is not any particular tool or workflow but actually taking pattern-making seriously. And I'm not talking only about tracing patterns, that is good as an introduction to the subject, but it will fall short as a technique in production. What I mean is actually learning the fundamentals (as shown in books like The Magic of Pattern Making) and going deep into research for historical examples.

It is truly wonderful to be able to play with clothing and fashion without material constraints and endless hours of sewing. So, experiment around and keep it fun!

Diego Conte, CFX Artist

Interview conducted by Theodore McKenzie