I messed around with Marvelous Designer a whole bunch throughout the week! It was pretty much the only thing that I was using. I'm very happy to show the progress!

At first, it was mostly just messing around and coming to grips with the majority of the tools that Marvelous Designer had to offer. Luckily, Marvelous isn't some obscure program with no body using it, so finding tutorials for stuff was very easy. Once I figured out how to actually make shapes, it simply became a matter of finding a pattern to trace over and sewing together. I would say that my experiments with the t-shirt payed off quite a bit. However, the pants are still something I'm struggling with. For the time being, I've got a simple substitute and a belt for roughly how I want the pants to look. The only problem is that I intend the pants to sag over the shoes, which have been a real pain to try and make. Shoes are much more complicated that draping some cloth over a model, and any attempt to make them in both Marvelous and Maya have gone bust. I'll try and take another crack at them once I finish up some other parts of the clothing that I'll show later in this post.

I did try out making a sleeveless turtleneck at one point. And to be completely fair, it fit the model quite well! Sadly, it just wasn't the vibe that I was attempting to make for this model. I also did originally want to give them a large coat, but I opted for something else. I wanted to make it a sort of Vash the stampede kinda thing; A huge encompassing coat with a bunch of trailing bits on the outside of it. But I simply couldn't find a pattern of coat that I liked the look of, so I scrapped that idea in the end.

I eventually got a t-shirt that I was happy with (sort of). Every other attempt to make a t-shirt was okay, but wasn't as good as it could be because of how the edges of the arms interacted with the sleeves. There would just be an annoying dip that would make him look almost bony in a way. To remedy this, I added some positive pressure to the sleeves to inflate them a bit. While it still didn't look perfect, I had an idea to fix it up.

I got far enough with the sleeveless turtleneck idea that I imported it into Maya and started cleaning it up. What I had found is that Maya's retopologise tool worked really well for the application that I was using it for. For every other piece of clothing since then, I've used the exact same method for the clean up process. This makes the mesh for the clothes very easy to work with and gives them clean geometry to work with. As an extra step of the process, I usually cut the clothing in half and mirror it to get rid of any asymmetry that might have happened in Marvelous, and extrude outwards to give some more dimension to it.

And this is where I'm at with the clothes now! After some changes to the t-shirt, and adding a coat, it's very looking very stylish if I do say so myself! The coat itself is based off of the TF2 item The Tyurtlenek for the Heavy, and was something that I wanted to add as a little tribute to one of my favourite games (and as a compromise for not finding a longer coat design that I liked). There are still a few parts that I need to touch up, but I would say that the upper half of the model is very close to being done. I'll have to tackle the shoes in the coming week to be able to work on the pants. I think that I might try to use Zbrush to make the shoes and see if I have any luck with that. I do have a little bit of experience with Zbrush from college, but it's fairly limited and I didn't really wrap my head around the more complex tools in that program.

I would say that I'm still on my animation hiatus. This is because of the fact that I am obviously on a roll with model at the moment, and also because I should get a response back on my application to my post-graduate course and I want to let that get sorted before heading back into animation. I also haven't really been looking for a decent series of videos to follow along with. It shouldn't be too hard, but I haven't had much time to do that (see model above!). I'm still very anxious about getting into the course, but I'm remaining hopeful.

Thank you and good-bye for today!