Marvelous Designer 5 review

Side geometry

Being able to add thickness to a garment is a no-brainer. Marvelous Designer proposed the user to enable thickness at export for a while. But this was no better than adding a shell in 3DS Max (or any equivalent 3D package). This is where the developer proposes the user with a better option: curved side geometry. Again, combined with the other features it gets extremely powerful. In the example on the image I have tried to create a shirt collar.

Step 1: turn the collar (using fold arrangement).
Step 2: duplicate the collar, flip the normal and sew the two collars together using the turned sewing.
Step 3: setup the curved side geometry.

Done! Faster than ever!

Aligning points

That is a most modest addition in terms of complexity, but still appreciated. You can now select a bunch of points in the 2D view, right click, and then align them on the X or Y axis. One could bet that this could lead us to interesting new modes for point manipulation in the upcoming versions.

Round corners

In the previous versions, if you wanted to round off corners of a pattern you pretty much had to eyeball it. The developer added a new tool in the 2D Toolbar to round corners off. Technically, this turns any point into curve points and then interpolates the outline to create a curved chamfer. Drag more for a broad chamfer, or less for a narrow one. It works equally well on an outline than an internal line. This is something you do a lot in production. As a consequence it is as much of time-saver as a nice way to get a clean corner.

UV Guidelines

One feature of MD that is often overlooked is the perfect UVs it produces. It makes a huge difference in a production pipeline. In previous versions, the developer introduced the « Unified UV coordinates » at export. This made your UV clusters match the 2D pattern layout while fitting in a 0..1 UV space. There was no significant improvement to this feature until today. MD5 now gives you more control over how you want your UVs to be after export. You can drag a rectangle in 2D space that will represent your 0..1 UV space. This is exactly what you will get after export in the 3D package of your choice. You still need to activate the « Unified UV coordinates » at export though.

Avatar upgrades

The avatar gets its piece of the pie, too. I am actually surprised it took so long to the developer to add a measuring tool. It is now integrated in MD5 and you can take measures just like a professional tailor. A specific toolbar has been designed for this, with 3 distinct modes: The first one (basic tape) will take linear measures, which is perfect for measuring the length of a pair of jeans legs. The second one (basic circumference) will wrap around a surface, just like a slice, which is perfect for measuring the circumference of a chest or a waist line. The 3rd button is to edit the measures taken. This one is so poorly designed that I failed to simply get anything out of it. Another sad thing is that for some odd reason the toolbar is not active by default. You will need to right click on the 3D toolbar to activate it.

But there is more to the avatar upgrade. If you ever wanted to deactivate the avatar collision in previous versions you know how painful that was. You pretty much had to load another « empty » avatar to trick the tool into avoiding avatar collision. MD5 fixes the problem by introducing a collision detection toggle on the avatar. You can also hide avatars individually if you loaded multiple ones. However the design is not very elegant when combined with the show/hide avatar shortcut (shift+A). Both systems conflict with each other and it could lead to some confusion from time to time.

Coordinate Gizmo

This one is a very small upgrade. If, like me, you sometimes ended up rotating a pattern while initially intending to move it (or vice versa), you probably got a bit frustrated. By default the new gizmo is still in unified mode. But hitting shortcuts will now get you to specific behaviors: Q for select, W for move, E for rotate. Not mind-blowing but helpful.

Simulation Speed

The developer promised a 30% speed update in simulation mode. I have no reason to doubt their numbers but I can only confirm the simulation is slightly faster. By how much precisely is difficult to say. But any improvement is always very welcome. As I use the PC version, I cannot confirm the 70% of simulation speed on the Mac version.

On a side note, I did not take a full paragraph to describe some other minor but still meaningful features such as the eyedropper, the LXO export for Modo, or the fact that you can now save your simulation options within your project file. This doesn’t mean they are not great, but they are pretty much self-explanatory.

Overall it feels like those new features combined together give you a significant productivity boost. The leather jacket example on the image is striking. It was done completely under an hour. I roughly estimate that the new functionality improved my efficiency and speed by about 30-40%.

It “seams” perfect…but there are still some regrets

MD5 gives us a ton of stuff already. But artists can never stop asking for more, can they? I was really expecting some more improvements that were not part of this new release. Amongst those few regrets, I could name:

Quadrangulate is still really below expectations. Compared to other plugins built into more traditional modeling packages (like Maya NCloth, to name only one) the topology it produces is mediocre at best. This feature merely turns two triangles into a quad, and as a consequence, the flow of the edges is not good enough. It does subdivide a bit better (than ZBrush for instance), but falls way below expectations as far as I am concerned.

Avatars are missing something really nice too: I wish avatars could better mimic the behavior of skin and be slightly deformed by the simulation. For instance, I wish you could tie a belt so tight around the waist that the skin would get pushed in a bit. If you have tried creating a chubby or overweight character in MD you probably know what I mean: You have to sculpt your avatar to fake the guts hanging lose over a tighter waist line. As a side note, it is also probably the right time to mention the built in avatar are still super ugly and stiff in their posing. In my opinion they are pretty much useless in their current shape.

Next in the list is an old favorite of mine: the “synchronize” button. In previous versions, you could desynchronize the 2 views if you wanted to put the simulation on hold while you did some changes in the 2D view. It was very handy. The button seems gone, and the synchronization between the 2 views is always on. Did the developer remove the feature or is it hidden somewhere? Did they judge it no longer relevant? In both cases I think it is a shame.

Last but not least, a few words about the pricing. Perpetual personal license is $550. Subscription is $360 per year, $60 per month. In my humble opinion this is a bit too high. Enterprise licenses are quite expensive, too. Upgrades don’t come free of charge. Upgrading price is usually 50% of full price of the following version. Skipping a versions leaves you with no other choice than full price on the following one. I know MD is an amazing program that requires a lot of skills and hard work to ship and maintain, but it is still quite specialized. Individuals and businesses have a lot of other programs to acquire and I think few will afford upgrading to every new version of MD.

Conclusion

This new release of Marvelous Designer is definitely a major one. The focus has clearly been put on optimizing your workflow and making it a lot more efficient. It is faster than ever to get to a point where you consider your garments as good as done. The most tedious tasks have been made a lot easier: cutting, offsetting as internal lines, fold arrangement, trace, round corners, to only name a few. The improved speed of simulation is a great addition, too. Not only those new features are great by themselves, but they also add so much to versions 4 and 4.5 improvements that the package feels more mature than ever. It is a bit overpriced, and there are still improvements to be made in the future, but if you can afford the upgrade, I strongly recommend this version.

Raphael Boyon is a Lead Character Artist with years of experience in the video games industry. He has worked at Ubisoft Montreal on games such as Assassin's Creed 3, Assassin's Creed Revelations and Assassin's Creed Unity. You can find out more about Raphael and his work at www.bohemond.fr.

Title image (c) Copyright CLO Virtual Fashion Inc. All other images (c) Copyright Raphael Boyon, provided courtesy of the author.

Related Links:

• Marvelous Designer's website
• Image gallery
• Video tutorials
• Manual

Notes:

• A trial version is available.

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Tags: Marvelous Designer | Cloth | Modeling | Cloth Dynamics | CLO Virtual Fashion