HOW I CREATE ARMOR & CLOTHES by Dylan Kowalski

This course isn’t about basic t-shirts. Dylan Kowalski shares his personal, time-tested approach to using Marvelous Designer for creating complex armor and clothing that you’d normally think requires heavy sculpting. You’ll watch over 35 hours of real-time footage building two complete projects, plus a narrated section that walks you through the entire pipeline from MD to a final render.

🎯 What you’ll learn

• Create complex armor and clothing patterns in Marvelous Designer
• Export and weld meshes for a clean ZBrush import
• Set up topology, retopology, and UVs for game-ready assets
• Use ZBrush’s subdivision and dynamic subdivision for clean detail hierarchies
• Export your final assets into Substance Painter for texturing

✅ Requirements

• Skills: Basic knowledge of Marvelous Designer is required. Familiarity with ZBrush is highly recommended.
• Tools: A 3-button mouse is recommended.
• Hardware: A computer capable of running Marvelous Designer, ZBrush, and Substance Painter.

📝 Description

This course is built around a simple idea: Marvelous Designer can do a lot more than just fabric. Dylan has spent years developing a workflow that lets you create hard-surface armor, complex layered clothing, and intricate details directly in MD, saving you hours of manual sculpting.

The core of the course is 35 hours of real-time, un-narrated footage. You’ll watch him build two completely different projects from scratch: a modern “Roller Girl” and a fantasy “Elfic Armor.” This isn’t sped-up or edited; you see every click, every mistake, and every solution.

To tie it all together, there’s a dedicated ~1 hour narrated section. This is where Dylan explains the critical pipeline steps: exporting from MD, importing and welding meshes in ZBrush, setting up a clean subdivision hierarchy, handling UVs, and finally exporting everything into Substance Painter. He also covers how to create ID maps in ZBrush for efficient texturing. By the end, you’ll have a repeatable, efficient system for taking a Marvelous Designer base all the way to a finished, portfolio-ready asset.

🧑‍🎓 Who this course is for

• 3D character artists who want to speed up their armor and clothing creation process.
• Artists already familiar with Marvelous Designer who want to push the software beyond standard fabric simulation.
• Game artists looking for a clean, production-ready pipeline from Marvelous Designer to ZBrush and Substance Painter.

🧑‍🏫 About the Author

Dylan Kowalski is a professional 3D artist who has spent years developing a unique workflow for Marvelous Designer. He focuses on creating original characters and specializes in using the software to build complex armor and clothing that bridges the gap between cloth simulation and hard-surface modeling. His approach is practical, efficient, and built from real project experience.

🏁 Final Result

• A complete, textured armor or clothing set for a character, ready for portfolio presentation or game engine integration.
• A deep understanding of a non-standard Marvelous Designer workflow that can be applied to any future project.
• Two fully realized project files (Roller Girl & Elfic Armor) to study and deconstruct.