Research Project - Jedi Robe in Marvelous Desginer

 

    One of the unforseen negatives of working with marvelous designer is that since the tool is usually used by established pros, long term 3d artists, there is not a lot of help or guidance when it comes to ensuring a correct start to a project with minimal hiccups. For example, it took around 2 hours of repeated attempts of follow the most basic of basic starting steps,  and ending up with geo like that shown below, before I eventually noticed that the gridlines I was working with were much larger than those I was seeing in most every tutorial. No where had I seen it written or spoken about how important it was that these cloth sims be ran at reasonable scales, nor had I seen it used as a possible explanation when I would search "why is my marvelous designer garment exploding upon simulation."

 So. step 1 for anyone trying to work in Marvelous Designer, make sure your objects are at an appropriate scale! I personally made a simple dynameshed geo of Bell and scaled it by 5x to get something that can properly and effectively provides the structure for our cloth-simmed Jedi robes to fall upon. From here, the next thing I did was create a polygon shape in the 2d viewport, click X to add points to the polygon to give more adjustability and get the shape I'm looking for in the end of a panel of robes by adjusting the points after clicking V.  Do this until you have a shape vaguely like the shape on the right of the image below, and in the 3d viewport line up the plane just off set of the body with the white face side facing away form the body. From here I simply duplicated the panel and mirrored  until I had 4 panels that would make up the basis of our robes' front and back panels. 

Using the segment sewing tool (N) I connected all of the edges except the arm holes in the sleeves, the head hole, bottom hole, and the front most seam, as the Bell's robes are left open in the front. Once you've successfully sewn your edges together a simple tap of spacebar will run the simulation and allow the artist to tug the material and garment around to their hearts content to get the specific fit they were looking for. 

For my final project I plan on making the Robes out of a posed version of Bell, exporting the retopologized and simplified geo into Zbrush and painting my specific details there, and then remeshing and UVing the robes for texturing last. As far as my remaining work in marvelous would go I just need to tweak parameters such as thickness and elasticity to my liking before retopo-ing and exporting this geo out. It really doesn't get more simple than a robe, so long as your scale is properly set up before you get going in the simulating.