I recently started playing around with the tool Marvelous Designer... for anyone that does not know the tool (and is to lazy to follow the link... no, I am not paid by anyone to make shameless ads, the link is just there as explanation for the uninitiated )

I have to say I am highly impressed and skeptical at the same time. The cloth physics engine is impressive, and for simple clothing you get good results quickly.

I am a little dissappointed about the performance of the tool though, first I thought that it was strange that all the vids I have seen of somebody presenting their virtual clothing with an animation from MD had hacky animations with low FPS... surely not all of these people could be using a toaster for a PC?

Then I tried it on my own Workstation, which might have Gamer Hardware that is now ageing being 3 years old, but was top of the crop 3 years back and is still very strong today: a 6 core i7 with hyperthreading, a GTX 580 and 24G of RAM should give MD enough power for all its cloth physics black magic.

Yet even with my PC, things get really slow as soon as I start to reduce the Particle Distance, which seems to be MD language for Mesh Resolution.

Then there is the whole thing with the cloth pattern creation. To say the whole thing is giving me headaches is an understatement. I have no idea about cloth sewing in RL, so while creating a basic skirt or shirt might be easy in MD, as soon as it gets more complicated, I start to struggle.

while I really like the idea of not having to sculpt all the folds in my clothing items by hand, getting down the basic shape of the clothing and then adding the details seems to be really painful with the limited toolset MD currently is equipped with.

So my question to anyone that has already tried the tool, or might even be a pro user: What is your opinion on it? Is it worth its asking price, does it REALLY help with efficiently sculpting clothing items for game characters, or is it in the end just saving time on one end while adding headaches at another?

Also, as a total newbie, I am struggling with some things:

1) the only symmetry I found was "copy as symmetrical", which means you will have a seam in the middle. Woot? It just can't be that there is no symmetry tool available for creating clothing pattern patches in a symmetrical fashion without a seam in the middle. Did I miss something?

2) Is there a function to import a Pattern, or at least a image file as a rough pattern guide to draw over? I am thinking about creating the basic shapes in 3D Coat, unwrapping them and then using the UV set as cloth pattern in MD. I am much more proficient with Voxmodelling than with creating clothing patterns.

3) Did anyone found the reason for the bad performance of MD? Is it just missing any kind of Multithreading or GPGPU Acceleration (which I suspect it is)... is there an option I missed that leads to the bad performance on my machine?

I am aware that I might need to take my questions to the MD Forum for a better response, I just wanted to see if there some users here have made any expierience with the tool... usually you will not find the highly critical users on the message board of the company creating a software itself. And there seems to be a big hype around MD which I struggle to fully understand, so to speak.

Then there is the whole thing with the cloth pattern creation. To say the whole thing is giving me headaches is an understatement. I have no idea about cloth sewing in RL, so while creating a basic skirt or shirt might be easy in MD, as soon as it gets more complicated, I start to struggle.

At my last job, the artists ordered actual physical clothes as reference, then cut them apart along the seams to see how they were constructed, and then got stuck into using MD to recreate similar clothing

Wow, that is what I call true dedication... but I think I will not go this far .... now that I think about it, you could also order pattern as pdfs or physical papers and use them as guidances.

@ slowpid: Wow, thanks for the lengthy post! I might have overreacted a bit. After another 1 hour session I think I am starting to get the hang of it. I just found out what the free sewing tool is for. And there I wondered at length how they sewed the free jeans pattern together

But in one point you are right, and generally I completly agree: If you want to model something true to life, you have to follow real life processes as much as you can. Thats what I do with technical stuff, so creating clothing from patterns seems to be the ideal solution.

Still a bummer about the symmetry, but I will try your recommendation about the seam strength.

Also, good idea about the monthly sub... I usually at least get yearly subs as I do all my work as a hobby and usually jump back and forth between topics (works better for me, keeping up motivation during long unpaid "free time" work). But definitely a thing to keep in mind for the future, and a good idea to start with a monthly sub for an "extended trial period" anyway.

Maybe another question: is there any good webpage where I could get clothing patterns from? Free or not I don't care too much.

EDIT: Just a quick thing about setting the seam strength to 0. For loose clothing its a bad idea, because the seam will now be very floppy, so if its at an area that is very loose, the seam might actually become more pronounced than before.

I found leaving the seam at the default strength of 5, with the default 180° angle worked best at hiding the seam, at least for the simulation. How this seam will look after the export to another 3D Package is another matter of course.