Creating A DForce Dress – Daz3D Studio & Marvelous Designer

Some life events have taken place that has given me back my free time. That said, the thing I really have wanted to tackle the most in 3d design and art is…CLOTHING!!!! Returning to Marvelous Designer once more, I feel like I need to start back over with the basics, having been away from Marvelous Designer for so long.

There are several ways in which you can make 3d clothing for your models. Most people use 1 of 2 programs: Blender, or Marvelous Designer. Blender has the advantage of being free, with tons of great free resources and tutorials. Marvelous Designer while not cheap, is the big dog and industry leader in costume and clothing design for 3d models.

With my background in sewing, I understand and can use that knowledge in Marvelous Designer which very much acts like a tailoring room, and follows core concepts of sewing. So, diving back into Marvelous Designer means that I will create a lot of generic clothing as I get a foundation of how to create 3d clothing.

Along the way, I plan on offering these early experiments and creations as freebies for others to use.

Program versions used: Daz 4.12 and Marvelous Designer 9

Of course, once a dress is created in Marvelous Designer using a G8F avatar, I still need to get it into Daz and set it up as functional clothing. Export the dress as a .obj without the avatar, and import it into Daz on the model you plan on building it around. I stick to mostly g8 models, so that is what I will be working with.

The transfer utility will help a ton with getting your clothing setup.

The workflow for this simple dforce g8f dress was this:

1. Open Marvelous Designer and import/open your G8F avatar
2. Design dress on G8F avatar. Any wrinkles in the clothing will carry over into the .obj file so many certain your fabric is laying how you want, and the wrinkles are not horrible.
3. Export dress without avatar as .obj and when doing so make certain you pay attention which options you want such as weld, or thin-walled in Marvelous Designer. Make certain you have set up your UV in Marvelous Designer before you export. A bad or sloppy UV will mess up your ability to do shaders and materials on the clothing in Daz.
4. Open Daz 3D Studio, and add default G8f
5. Import .obj file just created
6. Using geometry editor edit names and parts of the dress to make better sense
7. Transfer utility from g8f to dress, use smoothing modifier
8. Apply D-Force Modifier to the dress
9. Test posed and function of the dress to make certain it drapes and moves with dforce
10. Setup materials and surfaces
11. Save for sharing with others and setup metadata

As always, don’t ever underestimate the power of a nice map for your 3d content. For this dress, I made my own custom maps as well. Simple, and elegant in style.

When it combines all together, you have this delightful little party dress with dforce for g8f.

Enjoy 🙂