Fun with CLO and Marvelous Designer (Patreon)

I've had great fun getting back into Marvelous Designer this week, as well as its big sister CLO. You may not know this, but MD was not originally designed to be a 3D app. It's more of a "little brother" project made by their Korean parent company CLO Virtual Fashion, and they have their sights set on bigger and more profitable things, like real life garment creation. 

CLO is their flagship software, available for $50 a month. Features coming to MD are usually introduced in CLO a year earlier, like native support for Substance materials in the latest version. It's designed for users who only have one 3D app on their computers and those who don't work with a 3D output in mind. CLO has an integrated V-Ray render engine, with which the above images were made. 

Marvelous Designer on the other hand has a few features that wouldn't be of use to a fashion designer, like retopology, sculpting tools and a UV editor. I've explained a bit more about the differences on my Artstation Page. There's also a rad turntable animation on there that I can't seem to post here on Patreon.

I've been away from MD since version 6 back in 2016 and haven't upgraded since. Impending licensing changes for version 10 suggest that the company have decided to go subscription only, which means I'd lose the option to upgrade my perpetual license if I don't act now. Inspired by this notion, I've decided to download the trial version of both CLO 6 and Marvelous Designer 9.5 and take an in-depth look at them both. I had three years of feature upgrades to investigate.

What can I tell you? I LOVE them! I had almost forgotten how much fun it is to play with the cloth tools. So many useful features have landed in my absence, like modular clothing, buttons, zippers and a ton of other exciting stuff. I've made the beanie hat after watching one of Travis David's tutorials and was really happy with the results. The baseball cap I've devised this morning without looking at a tutorial at all - I'm chuffed about that! Julia brought back a baseball cap from Atlanta a couple of years ago, and the design was purely based on speculative inquisitiveness and fun trying things out.  

For me, that's what 3D is all about: we may not know every tool in the menu, but if you have a good starting point, and an app is built intuitively enough, everything falls into place when you need it. I think it's super important for us creative folks to have apps like that. Life is too short for boring, badly designed, undocumented and complicated software. 

I thought I'd share my little inspirational foray into the virtual hat world with you. Let's see what Marvelous Designer inspires me to do next. If ever I figure out how to bring these objects across into DAZ Studio and setup the materials properly, I'm happy to share them with you 😎