Marvelous Designer for Enviro Art

Taylor Brown

Question for the game enviro artists out there: Is Marvelous Designer something you use regularly? I'm currently learning it as part of a course I'm in and have no love for the process.

I want to gauge if it's one of those things that's on the growing need-to-know list for portfolios, like having experience with Substance Designer.

Biomag

I would expect anything related to environment art is as simple as it gets in Marvelous Designer. It has a difficult entry until you wrap your head around the patterns, but then its one of the easiest tools in the pipeline and usually only character artists have to do more complex stuff in it.

Creating cushions, bed sheets and curtains shouldn't be much of an issue. Beyond that I don't think there is much that environment artist could be using it for.

Taylor Brown

I can definitely see some practical applications for it. I'm just wondering how often working folks find themselves using it so I can determine how much time I should focus on it myself.  There's definitely parts of it I like more than nCloth. I think you're right, I just need more time and possibly a different instructor

CrackRockSteady

I think the software looks amazing and I would love to learn it at some point but as to the question "do you use it regularly" the answer is definitely "no", I have never used it.  The times I have needed to make a prop with cloth bits have been few and far between and I've either used 3ds Max's cloth sim or just done it by hand.  Probably didn't end up with results as amazing looking as if I'd used MD but at the end of the day I can't justify the purchase of a software license at my studio for something I'd use extremely rarely.

If you're working on a project where you find yourself building lots of models that have cloth parts then learning MD is probably worth the time and $ investment.

As far as being a "need-to-know" software for environment artists, I'd say probably not.  If you know how to use it, neat.  If not, I really don't think it's going to affect your ability to find a job if your environment work is strong.

Edit:  I thought this bit from @PixelMasher in this thread was relevant: "If you are a beginner, focus on making the best looking environments you can until you can at least get a paid junior postion. This means focusing on layout, composition, and being able to translate 2d concepts to 3d environments efficiently.  Most other things are distractions and irrelevant until your aristic eye is developed and you are consistently putting out aaa quality work."

I think Marvelous Designer can definitely be a great tool in an Environment Artist's toolbox but it is a fairly niche software with a very specific purpose and I would say it is probably better to focus your efforts on bringing your environment art basics up to AAA quality before getting mired in learning software that you probably won't use very often as an environment artist.

Alex_J

Playing some Rebellion games and a Naughty Dog title a few nights ago, I noticed a number of curtains, table cloths, tarps, things like that that were most likely made in MD. But, as mentioned, this is so simple to do. It's just importing your mesh into the program, and dropping a big square or rectangle onto it, playing with parameters, and exporting. Finishing touches in zbrush. If you were going to make those same assets without MD, you would need a really solid understanding of cloth dynamics, and a lot of time to just sculpt them. And I doubt the result would still be as good as what MD can do in 10 minutes.

I think a week or two of messing with the program is enough, from there you just look up problems as you find them. You don't really have to understand all the sliders, you just play with them until it looks right. Very visual. There is some good free tutorials on youtube from Lori Griffiths that are better than any paid tutorials I've taken. There is another website called CGelves where you can buy premade patterns along with cloth dynamic settings that you can trace -- you do a few of these and you'll understand the program well enough. These are all geared towards clothing, but if you can do that I think you'd be well off for most environment artist applications.


cg elves 

lori griffiths youtube (best free tutorials)



and I agree with above -- it's a niche tool and not going to make or break you as an artist, but if you can spare a week or two to get some competency with the program, it can really save you a lot of time in some circumstancces. A weird tool at first, but it doesn't have a ton of depth so once you get it, that's that.

Jonas Ronnegard

Yeah it's a powerful tool for prop and environment work as well but as other has said it can be long in between uses, I just license it for a month every time I need to use it and let it expire after that.

Meloncov

Do the sort of work for your portfolio you want to do professionally. If you like working with Marvelous, put something with a lot of drapery in your portfolio, and you'll likely become the go-to person for cloth on the environment team. If you don't like it, no one is gonna look at your portfolio and say "Well, this is a lot of great work, but he doesn't know Marvelous Designer, so we're gonna have to pass.".

Taylor Brown

Thanks for the input y'all. It confirmed what I was already feeling.