INTERVIEW from Winners | Hunt: Showdown 3D Apparel Creation Contest

By Shaafi Ahamd -1st Place in Amateur Category

Where did you get the inspiration of your hunter?

When I decided to take part in the contest, I had a couple ideas in mind of hunters from different parts of the world, but I settled on one from the Indian subcontinent.

It’s something which hasn’t been done much and I believed I could make something really unique with that idea and my own design choices.

My reference board had images of Mughal and British-era soldiers, princes, Cossacks, along with Turkic warriors.

Making it equipped for fighting while maintaining the local look and also balancing the overall design was a challenge.

Could you explain in chronological order what process you went through for the garment creation of your winning work?

I started the outfit off with the shoes and boots. Making any type of footwear in Marvelous Designer was an unknown and I wanted to tackle that first.

One thing I learned was that changing the material type and its various properties is crucial to getting any decent result.

There are a large amount of presets and “Trim_Full_Grain_Leather” is great for anything hard and stiff like the sole of a shoe.

I found that pulling and pinning to control and mold the garments is essential.

Getting garments within one another or looping them through each other is done this way.

Cloth pieces can also be held in place with pins to stop them from sliding around and ruining the look.

I made the waist wrap by putting many pattern strips into position with arrangement points and then just wrapped them round and round.

The same was done with the turban but this was more tricky. The cloth pieces slid and a combination of pinning and un-pinning was required so it could look natural.

After getting the general shape of the pants I used the Shrinkage Weft and Warp options to get the baggy look and folds. 

This way you can experiment a ton without even touching the actual pattern.

Making the tassels was a simple but laborious process of free-sewing a ton of pattern strips. Since there was an overlap of various garments, using the layers option resolved some simulation issues.

I incorporated a lot of internal lines in the shirt to add some visual interest. Mixing different

materials, like I did here with cotton and leather straps, can result in interesting results. For the backside of the bandolier I did the following: 1) Made one single, long pattern. 2) Added a single internal line at an angle. 3) While duplicating the line with CTRL C & V, I right clicked to set the number of lines and interval distance. 4) I then cut and sewed to get pieces and changed the material.

The symbols in each pocket are just internal lines with thicker top-stitching.

3. What was the most difficult part, and what part did you spend a lot of time on to complete this artwork?

The most difficult part had to be making the glass bottles and vials. It’s not something I thought I’d be doing initially. It took time figuring out which pattern shapes would give the best overall bottle shape.

The liquid inside was done with layer clone under, combined with a velvet material. The corks kept managing to slip out which had to be checked every so often.

4. What are the strong points that Marvelous Designer has? 

Marvelous Designer overall is fantastic but what stands out is being able to keep clean, consistent UVs regardless of how the mesh is actually simulated. In making the Shikari outfit I only had to re-position the UVs instead of unwrapping from scratch. Another thing I like is how the garment patterns can be modified any time during the creation and simulation processes. The largely non-destructive workflow is a great benefit. The animation with simulation feature is something I look forward to using in the future!

Thanks for the interview and your amazing work, Shaafi Ahmad! 

Link to Artstation