CLO Virtual Fashion releases Marvelous Designer 2026.0
CLO Virtual Fashion has released Marvelous Designer 2026.0, the latest version of the 3D clothing design software for game development, animation and visual effects.
New features include the 3D Pencil and Lacing Tool for creating garments, a new Toon Shader, updates to garment rigging and animation workflows, and support for the glTF file format.
Convert 2D patterns into animated 3D clothing
Widely used by games and animation studios, Marvelous Designer lets artists design 3D garments in the same way as real-world clothes, by stitching virtual 2D pattern parts.
Users can import an animated character model, drape clothing over it, then export the result back to a 3D application in Alembic, FBX or USD format, as an OBJ file sequence, or as a Maya cache, PC2 or MDD cache.
Garment creation: new 3D Pencil and Lacing Tool
New features in Marvelous Designer 2026.0 include the 3D Pencil, for creating garments by drawing the outlines of the pattern parts directly onto – or around – a 3D avatar.
It looks to be a more streamlined version of the workflow introduced in Marvelous Designer 2025.1 with the 3D Pen tool, to which its output can be converted for editing.
There is also a new Lacing Tool for creating lacing through rows of eyelets.
And for repurposing existing garments for characters with different bodily proportions, 3D garment shape is now preserved when you scale the 2D patterns.
Garment rigging: EveryWear Rig Templates help rig and skin wide garments
CLO’s EveryWear system, which automatically optimizes garments for use in games and real-time applications, gets an experimental Rig Template system.
It is intended to automate the process of rigging garments – more specifically, the process of creating joints to fix issues like silhouette distortion with wide garments like skirts and capes.
Rendering: new Toon Shader for cartoon looks
The update also adds a new Toon Shader, intended to make it possible to preview clothing that will be used on cartoon-style characters more accurately inside Marvelous Designer.
It includes standard controls for shading, outlining, rim lighting, and also supports opacity, emissivity, and MatCap materials for mimicking surface reflections.
Smaller feature updates
Existing features to get an update in Marvelous Designer 2026.0 include the new Fur Strand material, which now respects seams and graphics.
There are also updates to symmetry, retopology and the heat maps used to assess garment fit: you can find a full list of changes via the link at the foot of this story.
Workflow and performance: isolate selected objects in the viewport
Workflow improvements include Isolate Selection, for displaying only the selected object in the viewport, making it easier to inspect individual garments in complex scenes.
Similarly, it is now possible to show only the UVs of selected garments in the UV Editor.
To help keep projects organized, it is now possible to archive patterns that are not currently in use, and to add markers to the animation timeline.
Performance improvements include GPU acceleration when simulating Trims – accessories like buttons or buckles that are created as separate 3D objects.
Pipeline integration: glTF/VRM support, and support for blendshapes and morphs
Other changes include the option to import avatars in glTF and VRM formats.
Marvelous Designer also supports blendshapes on imported avatars – mainly intended for tuning body shape to avoid clothing penetrations, rather than facial expressions.
The software supports morph animations when importing or exporting Alembic files.
Users can also now export specific animation ranges, when exporting to FBX or glTF format, and automatically generate keys on empty frames when exporting joint animations in FBX format.
Price and system requirements
Marvelous Designer 2026.0 is available rental-only for Windows 11, RHEL/Rocky Linux 9.5+ and macOS 14.0+.
Personal subscriptions for Windows and macOS cost $39/month or $280/year.
Enterprise subscriptions now cost $199/month or $2,000/year for Windows and macOS, or $2,300/year including the new Linux edition of the software.
CLO Virtual Fashion also offers Indie subscriptions to studios with at least two staff and earnings under $500,000/year, but hasn’t publicly disclosed their cost.
Read a full list of new features in Marvelous Designer 2026.0 in the online release notes
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