Explore the imaginative realm of Lucas Camargo, also known as UntitledArmy, who uses Marvelous Designer to create stop-motion look animations featuring unique character designs.

Interview with Lucas Camargo | Creative Director

Please introduce yourself to the Marvelous Designer community.

Hi, I am the artist Lucas Camargo, a.k.a. UntitledArmy. I am a Creative Director, Freelance Illustrator, Artist, and Director. I create unique and thoughtful characters, designs, and ideas. I have worked in the creative industry for the last 20+ years, starting in advertising and then switching to 3D animation, and now I am a full-time artist.

Let’s talk about your recent project, “Super Heros”. Can you tell us where you got the inspiration for the concept or what was the visual style you were aiming for?

I love designing characters, thinking of different and unique approaches, and unexpected ways in a certain idea or universe. I often play around with some well-known characters to exercise what would be my approach, taking something that has been done to exhaustion is a good exercise to do, so I started with SpiderMan, and played with different silhouettes, thinking what if he had more a spider proportion, and from that I made some designs and jumped into 3d.

Same with Batman and Superman, it all starts with playing around and finding an angle, a time period, a feeling, or a silhouette. I do love to achieve a crafty look when doing things in 3d, that stop motion look, so using tools that enable that sort of hands-on feeling are things I like to explore in the process of making these.

How did you use Marvelous Designer in the artwork?

So Marvelous Designer's way of letting you design the clothes like you would in real life gives a feeling that the outfit was made for real, there is something different about a patterned outfit from a regular modeled one because the patterns give you some restrictions like you have in real life, you are dealing with real scale, fitting, some things are impossible and creating with a tool like Marvelous give me that sort of good restriction that can enable real and believable clothing.

So the thinking is if these characters were stop-motion dolls and you had to make their outfits, how you do that in 3d, the weird body shapes require a good understanding of cutting the patterns and trying outfits because is not like putting a sack of potato on them, I wanted the suits to be tailored to be flowing with their designs, and so having that realtime feedback that marvelous give you is amazing.

I start modeling the character's body in c4d or Zbrush, trying to get the silhouettes and proportions close to the drawings, and already thinking about how some contact points, like shoulders, hips, arms and will fill in or leave space for the fabric to settle, they can be simple shapes but when I bring them into marvelous I try to respect their body.

I start with big shapes and start to cut and pin and break down as I get the flow I want. Sometimes if the character has pants or a jacket, I try to find a real pattern and start from there as I adapt to their weird body proportions, I want their costumes to make sense and give that feeling it was handmade, so knowing how a jacket is made I essential to break it apart into something else, I am not a fashion designer but is quite similar process of designing.

Why did you decide to use Marvelous Designer? How did it help you serve art direction?

I am not a technical 3d guy, I started using 3d tools around 2017 at the same time these tools were starting to become more real-time, and less technical, so, in the same way, I was attracted to render engines that would allow me to see in real-time and work as a photographer figuring out organically the lighting, the same happened with marvelous, I saw how it had a similar way of letting you make decisions in real-time and it got my interest. When it comes to animation pipelines, although Marvelous has an animation feature, the studios I worked at usually worked traditionally, because the animations sometimes need some specific controlling, but I always tried to learn and experiment with it since is such a great tool.

Can you give us a quick overview of the different tools used in your pipeline?

My pipeline is around Cinema 4D and the tools around it like Redshift Render, and Zbrush for sculpting, I do use sometimes Substance Painter which is amazing for bringing stitches and all these little details., But usually, I start in C4D getting some blocking done, and testing ideas, and then I move into specific tools for modeling or look dev, for the need to get me more depth beyond what C4D can offer.

Do you have any other projects that you have worked on using Marvelous Designer that you can share with us?

Yes, there are some characters I have used. Sometimes it is faster to generate a piece of outfit with Marvelous than to try to model it, and the quality is so good that is a go-to tool.

How can you describe your overall experience of the use of the Marvelous Designer?

I think it is great software, is simple and very intuitive to use, there are enough YouTube tutorials for some specific things that might be harder to achieve, but for me, it was always very reliable, and the real-time interactivity you get with your designs is a game changer to create and have fun with it.

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