Practice 1: Development 2 – Nostalgia and Memory (D2 – 1)

Main Plan

For my second development project, I’ve chosen to revisit my late 18th century gown from the Nostalgia and Memory weekly assignment. I spent that week learning Marvelous Designer and didn’t have a chance to do any exporting, texturing, or rendering of my pieces. Therefore, I plan to take my gown and underlying undergarments, make them more historically accurate, and take them through the game-ready pipeline.

To present my work, I’m planning on creating a museum scene, showing off both gown and undergarments on mannequins with dramatic lighting, like this image from the Bath Fashion Museum.

Stays Revisited

I struggled quite a bit with my previous stays design, unable to get it stiff enough to create the desired shape. After I sat down to experiment further, I discovered a function in MD that allows for freezing a garment with a percentage leeway. This worked beautifully: I simulated the stays in zero gravity off the mannequin, set the freeze to 90%, and then re-sim’d onto the avatar so that the stays fit but still maintained their overall shape.

I ran into quite a few problems adding the outer edge seam tape, however. It kept trying to clip through the fabric, or was fighting the surface so hard that it distorted all of the tabs. I finally discovered that the issue lay with my seam angle; setting the upper seam to ‘turned’ and freezing the underlying stays body helped resolve this.

I then did the same technique for the upper edge and internal seam tapes.

For the boning channels, I experimented with creating them within Marvelous Designer using stitching and pressure, but the effect was heavily distorting the overall shape and wasn’t creating those defined channels. Instead, I created a custom alpha in ZBrush and applied it using noisemaker to much cleaner effect. I still need to rotate my UVs so that the bones are pointing in the correct direction (they should be V-shaped in the center front), but this technique is giving me nicely realistic results.