How to bring Marvelous Designer clothing into Blender

Marvelous Designer gives natural folds; Blender turns the result into something a virtual world can wear. The hand-over between them is an OBJ or FBX file and a little cleanup.

What you need

• Marvelous Designer
• Blender
• Your avatar or mesh body loaded in Marvelous Designer as the fitting model

Steps

1. Simulate on the right body. Drape the garment on the same body, in the same pose, that you will rig to in Blender.
2. Export. Export the garment as OBJ (or FBX): single object, welded, with thickness off for a game mesh, and note the scale unit you choose.
3. Import into Blender. Import the file and check that the garment stands on the body at the right size. If it is 100 times too big or small, the units did not match - re-import with the scale corrected.
4. Merge and tidy. Merge doubled vertices along the sewing lines (Mesh > Clean Up > Merge by Distance) and recalculate normals.
5. Decide: high or low. The simulated mesh is your high-poly. Make the wearable low-poly by retopology, or export a second, coarser version from Marvelous Designer with larger particle distance.
6. Carry on in Blender. Unwrap the low-poly, bake the folds from the high-poly, then rig.

Tips

• Marvelous Designer's own UVs follow the pattern pieces and are often usable as they are.
• Quad output from Marvelous Designer is easier to edit than triangles.
• Keep the .zprj project: refitting for another body starts there.

Next

• How to retopologize clothing in Blender
• How to bake a normal map in Blender

Words you do not know? See the glossary. All guides: how-to guides.

This page is a written overview. In the SL Designers video courses you watch clothing being made from start to finish, and our Blender addons take over much of the technical work.