Marvelous Designer has become a fundamental part of our toolset for creating digital garments and cloth simulations.

Jamie Franks | NIKE FOOTBALL: THE LAST GAME | Lead Effects Artist at Passion Pictures London

Can you briefly describe yourself and your recent projects?

I am a Lead Effects Artist at Passion London and have been part of the Passion team for the last 7 years, I have been involved in creating character effects for the Harmonix Rockband Cinematics, Gorrilaz promos, Compare the Meerkat adverts, BBC Olympics 2012 and most recently a 5 minute short film for Nike’s World cup Campaign.

The Last Game was one of the biggest and most challenging animation projects Passion has produced to date. An unbelievable amount of effort and detail was put into the film both creatively and technically which I feel really paid off in the final picture. There were many challenging elements during production but the most demanding task for the effects team was the amount of character costumes and the complexity and speed of some of the animations. There were 8 hero characters including Cristiano Ronaldo, Neymar, Wayne Rooney, Tim Howard, David Luiz, Iniesta, Zlatan Ibrahimovic and Frank Ribery, with each player having three costume changes throughout the film. There were also 20+ secondary characters that needed garment creation and simulations, and Marvelous Designer offered us a tool that we could be confident with and rely on to get through such a large volume of work.

Another interesting use of Marvelous Designer 3 on this project was for the giant sculptures in the Temple sequence. We simulated the football kits to generate various cloth poses and then took them into Zbrush to carve in some faceted detailing. These went down really well with the client and they eventually became life size 3D prints that were exhibited at Nike stores across the world.

Which features do you think provide a powerful advantage for Marvelous Designer compared to other clothing simulation tools?

The garment modelling is definitely the most powerful part in my opinion. It is very fast and intuitive to work with and it produces some really great results in a short amount of time. Many CG artists underestimate the importance of having a well prepared cloth geometry at the first stage of production. If the topology is clean and evenly spaced, collider intersections are already solved and the cloth fits well onto your character. Most of your battles are already solved.

This is something that comes for free when using Marvelous Designer 3. The simulation side of Marvelous Designer is very fast and yields some impressive results, but its collision accuracy is also its worst enemy when working with cartoon style characters as you tend to get a lot of self-intersection around tops of arms and upper legs.

In these cases we have to spend time preparing the animated meshes to avoid these self-intersections and often need to go between departments to move arms or legs to allow for cloth clearance. I would love to see some more controllability that would allow us to work through these kinds of issues and avoid having to go back to the animation stage.

Would you recommend Marvelous Designer to a CG artist and why?

Marvelous Designer has become a fundamental part of our toolset for creating digital garments and cloth simulations. I’m yet to see another system that allows you to model and visualize how a garment will look in its draped form. Also the way it handles multiple layers and detail, with such speed, accuracy and stability is simply amazing.

We look forward to seeing what new developments and features the Marvelous Designer team bring in the coming releases.