Native Dancer: July 2025 General Updates

Author: Ariann Rousu – Native Dancer Digital Artist

Summary

The progress on Native Dancer this month has been more behind-the-scenes, as I have been focusing on other time intensive projects. Still, the work continues, mostly on the intricate challenges still being faced with the Jingle Dress Design. This month I took time to backtrack again, and slow down, as I am using a whole new process to once again. Attempt to make the jingles directly in Marvelous Designer. The goal is to maintain simulation possibilities and realism, as well as keeping a somewhat low-poly count so the dress continues to function throughout the next processes. In this post I will be sharing those processes with you.

Jingle Design

For now, I am less focused on the look of this dress, designing and texturing can come later. I am strictly focused on having functioning jingles. To do this, I have begun by recreating the jingles, only using Marvelous Designer tools, instead of importing separate objs.

I have done this in the past, with using textures that simply “look” like jingles. But are lacking functionality we are aiming for. This attempt at making jingles in Marvelous Designer is tedious and time consuming but the results should be better than they have been before.

To start, I created and simulated a cone shape, using “cloth”. Once happy with the shape, I proceeded to attach one to the skirt of this soon to be dress. From there I created a whole row to test in the simulation, this went well so. I decided to proceed with adding more jingles, with the final goal of 365, on the final dress.

I got to about 200 jingles in the viewports, before the program significantly started to slow down. This is where I stopped and decided to take some steps to optimize the pieces so far. Currently I am reducing the polycount of all the pieces of the current project to help with this. Before proceeding, there are other collision and simulation settings I will be modifying to also help with optimizations.

What’s Next?

For the rest of this month and into August, my goal is to simulate all 365 jingles onto the new dress. Then texture it to have design and be metal jingles. With these “jingle” objects better attached and made directly in Marvelous Designer, I should have more control when creating the physics and movement of the garment.