"Marvelous Designer is a fantastically powerful software to accomplish different cloth stitching, seams, and sim situations."

Interview with Jeremy Scharphorn | Steampunk Sewing Machine | 3D Environment and Prop Artist

Artist Introduction

Hey! I'm Jeremy and I'm based in the U.S. I am a self-taught 3D Environment and Prop artist. I found out rather quickly that many indie companies combine the roles of a level and environment designer. I had zero ideas how to make anything 3D, but was determined to make any environment I could imagine! Fast-forward a few years and I'm still learning tons in 3D and receiving some game design gigs alongside art ones, but my heart is in environments and props! 

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

As an environment and prop artist, my cloth needs are a bit different than say, a character artists. As such, Blender has been an alright software for me for these past years since my cloth sim needs have been quite minimal. Though as my skills are going deeper into the intermediate range and as I'm shooting for that coveted "expert" skill set, I am switching to more industry standard tools that pack that extra punch that my work could really use. I'm still rather new to Marvelous Designer and ZBrush, but one rather common pipeline I have seen and am enjoying is using Marvelous Designer for cloth sims and then bringing it into ZBrush for finer sculpting as needed. Though I should confess, with the short time I had left to complete the competition I did skip the ZBrush step and went straight to Substance Painter. The additional fold details were all painted on procedurally with some extra manual adjustments as needed. For a photorealistic piece I would not recommend this route if time permits, but if you're crunched for time like I was, or are doing a stylized piece, skipping the ZBrush step and using Substance Painter is great as well. If I were to do it again I would create everything in Marvelous Designer and refine it as needed in ZBrush.

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

Marvelous designer is a fantastically powerful software. I am constantly surprised while working in it how relatively simple it is to accomplish different cloth stitching, seams, and sim situations. I already knew Marvelous Designer was an amazing software, but when working under that time pressure I was really shown how amazing it can be. Within a few hours, I had exactly what I wanted with no other production experience in the software and certainly no pipeline integration experience with it. Marvelous Designer gave me so much more control than any other software or add-ons could and learning it was incredibly easy! I highly recommend it to anyone, including environment artists, as it just can’t be beat!

by Jeremy Scharphorn

Artstation