Meshing Avatar Clothing 2 – Marvelous Designer Setup

Contents

In this tutorial, Creator In Residence Kuroi001 is going to introduce the Marvelous Designer application, how to import an IMVU avatar, and a quick setup of the app.

Here is more information from Kuroi001:

Hello, everyone! Before proceeding, a few words about the Marvelous Designer application. It is a 3D software where you create 3D garments based on a 2D pattern.

To learn more about the apps you can use to make your assets, read the article “What software should I use?”.

Importing IMVU Avatars

Before continuing, you need to export an IMVU avatar from your 3D software. It can be Blender, Maya, or like in my case, 3D Studio Max.

Be sure to delete any modifiers from your modifier stack to have a basic mesh of your avatar.

Now, you have to attach all body parts.

In my case, I am going to export the entire avatar with all body parts and, of course, with the skin texture that covers MCG areas, as it’s going to be very helpful in the future.

Select the avatar and click on Export ➞ Export Selected. You can export it as OBJ or FBX. In my case, I am using OBJ files.

Setting Up Marvelous Designer

After exporting the avatar, just go to your Marvelous Designer software, click on File ➞ Import ➞ OBJ, and choose your avatar file.

The settings you see should be fine. You don’t have to change anything, just click OK and you will have your avatar imported into Marvelous Designer.

As I said before, you have the 2D view where you draw your pattern, and the 3D view where your pattern is going to appear.

Additional steps are optional and include making arrangement points. You should already have those while importing your IMVU avatar.

However, if you don’t have them just click on Avatar ➞ Avatar Editor. Once the Avatar Editor window pops up, select the Arrangement tab.

As you can see, I have arrangement points and bounding volumes. If you don’t have them just click on Reset Bounding Volumes and they should re-appear.

You can remove unused bounding volumes to make more space by selecting and pressing the Delete button. You can also do this by selecting them from the list.

• Bounding Volumes

One important step before we proceed further is to select the Bounding Volumes and adjust them to be more skin tight. It’s going to be very useful in the future.

Bounding Volumes are points in space that will help you to attach or snap your 2D or 3D pattern to selected body parts.

When you finish setting up everything properly, you can save it as a project by clicking on File ➞ Save As ➞ Project and open it later on.

You can also save the avatar file. To do so, click on File ➞ Save As ➞ Avatar, choose your existing file or save it as a new imvu avatar. You can open your saved avatar file at any time and start working on your new project.

• Setting Colors

One final step. If you’re not satisfied with the color of the imported mesh, just select it and once the Property Editor Panel appears on the screen, click on Color and change it to white. This will change the texture to its normal color.