CLO Virtual Fashion ships Marvelous Designer 10.0
CLO Virtual Fashion has released Marvelous Designer 10.0, the latest update to the 3D clothing design tool, adding new Wrinkle and Release brushes for sculpting realistic wrinkles into cloth.
The update also makes it possible to customise the size and bodily proportions of an avatar and refit clothing to it automatically; and adds support for the Substance .sbsar format and pen pressure on graphics tablets.
It’s also the first version of Marvelous Designer to be available only on subscription, following CLO Virtual Fashion’s announcement earlier this year that it planned to discontinue perpetual licences.
Convert 2D patterns into animated 3D clothing
Widely used by games and animation studios, Marvelous Designer enables artists to design garments in the same way as real-world clothes, by stitching virtual pattern parts together.
Users can import a character model in OBJ or Collada format to drape clothing over, then export the result back to a 3D application as an OBJ, or in the Maya cache, PC2 or MDD point cache formats.
The 3D clothing responds to gravity and wind forces, and the resulting simulations can also be exported.
New Wrinkle and Release brushes sculpt realistic folds and wrinkles into clothing
New features in Marvelous Designer 10.0 include the Wrinkle and Release brushes: two new physics-enabled brushes for sculpting realistic wrinkles into 3D clothing.
The Wrinkle brush deforms the area under the brush into wrinkles; the Release brush relaxes the surface back to its original state. Both come with a set of standard control options.
Tools like this are very much flavour of the month in the industry, similar cloth sculpting brushes having been introduced in both ZBrush and Blender earlier this year.
Customise your 3D avatars and refit clothing to them automatically
As with Marvelous Designer 9.5 earlier this year, the update also adds new 3D avatars to the software: to judge from the images on the website, anime-inspired female characters.
It is also now possible to customise the existing avatars, including their height, width, and individual bodily proportions like limb length and chest, waist and hip circumference.
Users can also scale custom avatars imported in OBJ format inside the software.
A new Auto Fitting system semi-automatically converts clothing created for one avatar to the bodily proportions of another: the workflow is shown in the video above.
It seems to work with quite a range of bodily forms: the teaser video for the release, embedded at the top of the story shows one set of clothes being refitted from a human avatar to a dog.
Updates to the UV Editor and native support for .sbsar files
Marvelous Designer 10.0 also updates the software’s UV Editor, adding new options for controlling the scale, position and orientation of tiling textures across a garment’s surface, as shown in the video above.
Users can also now switch between texture map types (diffuse, normal, specular, and so on) in the UV view.
Other changes include native support for procedural materials in Substance Designer’s .sbsar format, and support for pen pressure when using Marvelous Designer with a graphics tablet.
Now only available on subscription
The release also introduces a new licensing model for Marvelous Designer, following CLO Virtual Fashion’s announcement earlier this year that it planned to discontinue perpetual licences.
For individual users, the cost of a subscription falls from $50/month to $39/month; for studios, the cost of a network subscription rises to $1,900/year.
CLO Virtual Fashion says that upgrades for existing perpetual licences will be available until Marvelous Designer 12.0, due to ship in fall 2022 if the firm sticks to its current release schedule.
Until then, you can trade in a perpetual licence for a one-year subscription, although you have to pay to do so, despite perpetual licences having been more expensive than annual subscriptions.
You can find full details of the new pricing in this blog post.
Pricing and availability
Marvelous Designer 10.0 is available for Windows 7+ and OS X 10.8+.
The software is now rental-only, with personal subscriptions costing $39/month or $280/year. Enterprise subscriptions cost $1,700/year for a standalone licence or $1,900/year for a network licence.
Read an overview of the new features in Marvelous Designer on the product website
Read a full list of new features in Marvelous Designer 10.0 in the online release notes