Marvelous Designer on How the CG Art Industry Has Changed Over the Past Decade

Marvelous Designer 10 Years Ago

Hello – I'm Sean Jeon and I currently serve as CTO at CLO Virtual Fashion, overseeing product development. I actually joined CLO in 2015, starting out as a Software Engineer for CLO and Marvelous Designer.

I remember we were starting to establish ourselves as makers of innovative tools that helped designers create virtual garments with unrivaled realism. That year, we launched Marvelous Designer 5 – we added features that supported various garment elements, such as buttons, zippers, trims, folds, etc. I recall being focused on optimizing the speed of simulation to make everything work a little bit faster. And at the time, simulation was slower on Mac compared to Windows – we've gotten much better.

Changes Within the CG Art Industry

I think a lot of people will agree that the industry has come a long way since 2015. In particular, advances in real-time rendering technology have been nothing short of phenomenal. With the continuous development of engines like Unreal and Unity, as well as improvements in high computational ray tracing and path tracing technologies, we're now able to produce and consume high-quality, real-time 3D content.

I think these innovations will create a new paradigm for the industry. Nowadays, due to the vast amount of assets being created and advances in rendering technology, it is easy and fast to create realistic digital results that are practically indistinguishable from real life, but 10 years ago, it took a lot of craftsmanship and know-how from creators to create such results.

I remember whenever I came across artworks that had great quality, I took great joy in looking up and learning from the artists on how they were made and learning about the technology, but nowadays, a lot of these advances are taken for granted – I sometimes miss those days.

Marvelous Designer's 2015 Challenges

When I look at artworks users created with Marvelous Designer 10 years ago, there's an amazing array of pieces that could only have been done by a few very talented creators. They took Marvelous Designer's limited features (compared to now) and found creative ways to make incredible work.

The challenge we faced at the time was to create features and standards so that more people could easily do the same, so we worked on things like the ability to work with buttons, zippers, trims, cuts, traces – essential elements of garment-making. It wasn't necessarily difficult to come up with the features since we were also working on a product aimed at the fashion industry – CLO – with a team of people who had expertise in how clothes were actually made. We took elements from existing garment production methods and made a digital tool that made the workflow more intuitive and seamless.

I think the biggest strength of our company is that we work with users in both the fashion industry, as well as gaming and VFX. I really enjoy learning from both worlds and being inspired by users that continue to tell us how we can improve in all of the disciplines.

Feature Highlights

Of all the features we recently added, the most notable for me is the improvement around GPU simulation. When the function was first introduced, it was tough because while it was fast, it had limited collision handling.

We've been able to refine that significantly and last year launched a version with big improvements. GPU simulation now produces results that are faster than CPU simulation, while maintaining the same level of quality. So if users now have a good GPU on the computers, there is no reason not to use GPU simulation. It is an improvement that many users have been asking for, so it was amazing to see how well it was received by the user community.

In 2025, our goal is to expand the capabilities of Marvelous Designer to be used for more than just garment design; in addition to adding animation functionality, we plan to make it into a more versatile tool 3D asset and content creation tool that can be used in various processes such as rigging, polygon and texture optimization, rendering, and more.

The Developer's Standout Moments

Every new release has been somewhat nerve-wracking and memorable in its own way, but when I look back on the last 10 years, I think the most memorable moment was in early 2024, when Marvelous Designer won the Academy Sci-Tech Award. When I started out in computer graphics, this would have been unthinkable! It was a really proud moment for me as a developer to see a product developed by my team win such a big award and get the world's attention.

So in that sense, I think the most successful year was 2024, and the most challenging year will be this year, as more people are now paying attention to what we'll do. I think one of our biggest achievements is that we've made the process of making garments in the content creation industry more sophisticated.

Previously, digital clothing was primarily made through sculpting in 3D, which not only took a long time, but also lacked sophistication because it was different from the actual method of making clothes. Our approach based on real patternmaking principles to create digital assets has been key to why so many users love our solutions, I think.

Conclusion

We really mean it when we say we're constantly learning from our users. They show us completely novel ways of working that we didn’t think about when we were developing the software, coming up with new knowledge and directional insights from the industry.

Some of our proudest moments are when we see amazing work from our creators. It lights a fire inside all of us to keep improving and make this better for them. We look forward to hearing more from them and collaborating in ways we can make the entire industry better. I'd also love to see more Digital Artists share their wonderful work on our community platform, CONNECT, so that we can continue to be inspired and folks can get the recognition and opportunities that they deserve.

Sean Jeon, CTO at CLO Virtual Fashion

Interview conducted by Theodore McKenzie