Native Dancer: Jingle Dress in Marvelous Designer
Author: Ariann Rousu – Native Dancer Digital Artist
For the past week and a half, I have been busy refining the designs of the jingle dress/dresses. I have finally been able to move forward with the design in Marvelous Designer(MD) after fully planning out the designs. In this post, I will be discussing all the steps I took to get this first jingle dress to its current stage in Marvelous Designer.
Since I had already created a look I was happy with the sleeves for the practice jingle dress in MD; beginning the new dress I simply copied and pasted the top portion to maintain the sleeve design and fit around the chest and back of the avatar. Moving forward from here, I began creating one half of the skirt with break points at the places I wished to attach ribbons and different colored portions of the dress. I then made a symmetrical pattern to create the other side of the skirt. After sewing the dress together and adjusting the skirt to fit correctly to the avatar, I created the back of the skirt. I now had a basic dress to begin detailing.
To begin the detailing of this dress, I first applied a fabric type and color setting to the overall dress. I then created copies of this first fabric with assorted colors that could be applied to different pieces of the dress. From there I began creating ribbons and more pattern pieces over the first pattern to create a second layer within the same size and shape as the first. I chose to create the dress this way, as the first layer was used to shape the dress and by sewing the second layer of the dress on, I was able to create a seamless front of the dress without showing two separate patterns split in the front.
After sewing all the different colored ribbons and fabrics to the skirt to create a more detailed dress I moved into Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop to create the floral designs that would go on the dress. Once I had several designs to try, I opened them as 2D graphics in MD and applied them to various parts of the dress. After I was satisfied with the overall look, I began to work on the vest, formed similarly to the dress. Next, I will be experimenting with creating a Jingle element to attach and repeat on the dress. I plan on doing this in another 3D program and uploading the piece to MD as an Obj. File.
