Digic Pictures, working on Assassin's Creed Mirage, relies on Marvelous Designer for intricate character clothing, emphasizing its speed, detail, and ease of use.

Could you introduce the recent project - Assassin's Creed Mirage?

Tamás Varga (character supervisor):

We are very pleased that Ubisoft has chosen Digic again for the trailer of the latest Assassin's Creed game.

Mirage takes the series back to its roots, with a renewed emphasis on stealth, parkour, and assassination, and a solid narrative-driven campaign set mainly within a single historical city, Baghdad 9th Century. Baghdad was the center of the Caliphate during the Golden Age of Islam. It was perhaps the greatest cultural, commercial,l and scientific center of the world at the time - and it is here that the protagonist, the street thief Basim, meets the Assassin Order.

So, as well as the main characters, it was also very important to portray the city and its inhabitants as vividly as possible, as a kind of living backdrop to the story of the protagonist's coming of age.

How is Marvelous Designer integrated in the project pipeline?

Tamás Varga (character supervisor):

We have been using Marvelous Designer for a long time and by now we are well aware of its capabilities, so we knew from the beginning that we would rely heavily on this software to implement the characters.

The clothing for the main characters (assassins, guards, etc.) was extremely complex: overlapping layers of different fabrics and armor, tight-fitting garments, and baggy capes - all things that Marvelous Designer was clearly the solution for.

But we also knew in advance that our characters would be moving through the Baghdad crowd throughout, that they would be surrounded by these "extra" characters (plain extras in English) in a lot of scenes, and that our director wanted to highlight some of these citizens. So it was decided very early on that all the other characters' outfits in the film would be made in Marvelous Designer, and simulated in every shot.

This required a number of major improvements, but luckily in many cases, we had been working on each of these for years and this became our first project where all the pieces of the puzzle finally fell into place.

Zoltán Turkovich (CFX lead):

From the modeling phase to the final simulation, the work on the suits was done in Marvelous Designer, on the CFX side, the finalization of the simulations was done only in 3rd party software.

Due to the large amount of assets and varied mass in the project, we developed a script called AutoSim tool, which after the final body animations on the Background characters were done, automatically ran the Marvelous Designer cloth simulations with default settings and saved them directly to the rendered shots, saving a lot of manual work on the project.

The rendered garment on hero assets is usually just driven by the simulated Marvelous Designer garment in our pipeline, but on this project, also due to the large amount of variation on the Background characters, the raw Marvelous Designer geometries were uploaded and rendered.

Please let me know what is the strength of Marvelous Designer compared to other simulation tools.

Varga Tamás (character supervisor):

The most important strength of Marvelous Designer is that it can simulate extremely beautiful and detailed clothing, and very quickly.

It is also a big advantage that it can be used for asset production. In a lot of the shots in the film, we rendered the background characters one by one with models made in Marvelous Designer.

Zoltán Turkovich (CFX lead):

Sample-based modeling, due to the clothing setup, it is easy to achieve authentic, realistic clothing simulations. The software is very easy to learn, it has a simple learning curve, so even novice CFX artists can learn it quickly. When the body animations are properly set up for clothing simulation, the clothing simulations run very stable, allowing easy clothing simulation of large amounts of characters.

Could you give examples of some of the iconic scenes and characters Marvelous Designer has been used for?

Zoltán Turkovich (CFX lead):

To me the most iconic sequence is the depiction of the Baghdadi bazaar and bazaar crowd, with lots of clothing variations, and colors - really achieved the look and feel of a live and vibrant market.

CFX-wise, the hood-turban removal of the initiation ceremony was a challenge to keep the costume simulation authentic with heavy contact animation.

If you could give advice to a person who just started to work with Marvelous Designer, what would it be?

Edina Schmidt (Modeling Artist)

Get a powerful processor, learn basic pattern editing. Recommend trying to model your own clothes first!

Norbert Geresdi (Modeling Artist)

Keep it simple! Although it's an exciting challenge to realize a well-drawn concept, it's usually a lot of work. Customizing even the simplest looking garments can be super challenging, so it's worth studying classic patterns first.

József Sáfár (CFX artist)

Expect post-simulation post-production and have fun!