Character model – clothes

Before starting working in Marvelous Designer, I watched a video by ProductionCrate explaining its basic features and workflow. From that I understood I’ll need to do some research on cloth patterns, since with the way the program works, it will be much easier if I had a general understanding of how the patterns should look before starting to create them.

Unfortunately, because my character comes from the 12th-13th century, it was pretty hard to find actual patterns of clothes from that era. I found this pattern for a dress (I modified the sleeves), and this article for general Middle Ages fashion.

This was my way of planning the various layers of her clothes.

I had her concept art on the top left for reference, and across the bottom I sketched how each layer would look like separately. On top, I sketched how I think the patterns could look like. I didn’t know the limitations of the program (or my own skills) yet, so I just planned everything, and if I ended up not doing it in Marvelous Designer and instead in Blender, so be it.

This is how she ended up looking

And these are the patterns for those clothes

I didn’t have too many issues, it was mostly a little tedious to just make a pattern, and fix it little by little until it fit correctly. There is a bit of fabric bunching under her belt on the left side of her hip and I can’t get it to smooth without ruining the other side, so I left it for now. The sleeves are loose, because I want them to bunch a little when I add the bracelets.

I tried adding shoes, but they kept clipping into the model, so I figured I could model them later in Blender. From my research, it doesn’t seem people really put bracelets in Marvelous designer, so I left it for later as well.

The shawl would not fall the way I wanted it to, no matter how much I changed the pattern. Since it will have elements over it (the braids and beads), I left that too for Blender.

Right now, I’m waiting on feedback from Mr Morris. This already might have to be scrapped, depending on how much I’ll need to fix the model, but at least I have the patterns now and know how to use the program, so if I have to redo it, it would take way less time.