Skirts

Having settled for creating partial circle skirts with standard pleating rather than the historically accurate rectangular skirts, my main challenge for these layers was in getting them to simulate correctly without conflict. So much fabric often got caught in the upper or lower layers, despite setting each skirt to progressively higher layer numbers in MD. I created a simple gathered petticoat to smooth the lines of the bum roll and stays (where a malleable garment would be pushed down by the weight of the overskirts in real life, digital garments are a little more solid). On top of that, I made the underskirt with a simple ruffle (simply knife pleated and then gathered onto the line of the underskirt. The final upper layer was an overskirt made of a duplicated pattern piece from the underskirt but rotated around and lengthened (one major advantage I wish was available for my real sewing needs!). I learned about functions like freezing and disabling garments to allow only certain pieces to simulate without affecting others, which appears to be a vital part of the Marvelous Designer workflow.

Bodice

For the bodice, I did end up testing both patterns from my historical books, and decided upon the Janet Arnold pattern for the final piece. It needed quite a few fit adjustments, both to fit my underlying avatar and to match up the pieces. Luckily, my real-life fitting skills translated over extremely well for this task; I’m used to doing very similar processes on paper and then fitting on a physical dressform. I suspect there is some minor stretching and warping happening in such a fitted garment, but I tried to do most of the fitting in a leather material that shouldn’t have much stretch. I believe Marvelous has some fit evaluation tools, but that’s something I’ll need to investigate later on.

Finished Garments

For my final touches, I added a few more gathered ruffles at the neckline and sleeve cuffs, and rendered the final piece with flat material shaders and a simple lighting setup in Maya. I’m generally thrilled with how much I was able to achieve in only a week’s time in a brand new program! I can already tell this is will be something that I want to devote far more time to, and I’m already considering how I can incorporate Marvelous Designer into my next project.