Tuesday, September 22nd, 2015 Posted by Jim Thacker

CLO Virtual Fashion ships Marvelous Designer 5

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Originally posted on 17 July 2015. Scroll down for details of the commercial release.

CLO Virtual Fashion has unveiled Marvelous Designer 5, the latest version of its pattern-based 3D clothing design tool, adding a new direct positioning tool and interactive UV editing.

Widely used by games and animation studios, the software 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.

New options for positioning, draping and editing virtual clothing
New features in version 5 include a new Direct Positioning tool to “easily arrange patterns and OBJs on the avatar”, along with new options to align points or lines to the X and Y axes.

The update also adds a new option to display UV guidelines, enabling users to “view and interactively edit” UVs.

In addition, the folding of seams, collars and cuffs can be adjusted in the 3D window before running the simulation to drape the garment over a character model.

There are also a number of additions to the 2D and measurement toolsets, including a new pattern cutting feature; and FBX import, introduced in version 4, now includes the option to import cameras.

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Updated 22 September: Marvelous Designer 5 is now officially shipping.

In addition to the features listed above, there are quite a few performance boosts: simulation speed is up 70% on Mac and 30% on other platforms, while changes sync between the 2D and 3D views twice as fast.

There are also a number of new 2D pattern-editing tools, and new measurement and display options for the avatars over which clothing is being draped. You can read about them via the link at the foot of the story.

Pricing and availability
Marvelous Designer 5 is available for Windows XP+ and Mac OS X 10.7+. A permanent licence costs $550, or there are monthly and annual subscription options.

Read a full list of new features in Marvelous Designer 5 on CLO’s website