Mastering Marvelous Designer: The story of Camille Kleinman

CGTrader and CG Elves have recently agreed on a limited time offer: $200 off a Mastering Marvelous Designer Beginners Course and Advanced Workshops. We wanted to let our community know more about the Marvelous Designer training program, so we asked to talk to the instructor of these workshops herself - Camille Kleinman. And oh boy, did she have quite a story for us!

At the age of 19, Camille probably boasts more experience than you could imagine. She provides us her story of coming up with Marvelous Designer training, helping the likes of Alessandro Baldasseroni in progress.

Could you tell us a little bit about yourself and your involvement in the 3D industry?

I'm Camille and I'm 19 years old. I live on a Caribbean Island since I was 12, when mom and I moved to the Dominican Republic from Germany where I was born.

In Germany I attended a mathematical Gymnasium, but as I preferred playing games and listening to books and stories my mom always read to me, as well as going on cycling and hiking trips, swimming at lakes during summer and ice skating in winter time, I probably skipped school at least 50% of the time. So I decided to drop out of school altogether first chance I got, and pursue things which I enjoyed more, like writing and art. That might sound like a lot of fun, but actually from age 12 to 15 my mother taught me online marketing, article writing, SEO etc. and made me work hard - child labor!

So at ripe old age of 12 I was published on all the big article sites, mastered SEO and even got a job offer from Examiner.com back in the days they were hiring writers (I told them I was 65). I was awarded the title of 'Elite Facebook Application Developer' when I was 13 for developing a gifting app back when those apps were very new.

When I was 15 I discovered After Effects and became fascinated by particle explosions and all the amazing VFX one could create. There's just so much space for creativity!

I studied VFX for a year from various free tutorials online, (Andrew Davis' beginners course from creative COW in particular was an incredible help getting started, he's a great teacher). It was a lot of fun, I even forgot to come to dinner (and I LOVE eating), as blowing up walls and turning people green was more exciting!

Then for a year I explored creating music with virtual instruments and created over 800 tracks for a royalty free music business we will launch when mom (the web wiz) finally gets around to building the site. The MIDI keyboard got rusty from all the sea breeze and I returned to my bigger passions.

When did you start working with the Marvelous Designer Training program?

When I was 18 I started learning ZBrush for a month (oh it was SO much fun, and can't wait to get back to it soon!). You see, I was looking for a way to be able to quickly create illustrations for over 100 childrens' story books I wrote. And the many awaiting to be written Stories come to me all the time faster than I have time to write them - so I record them. So then I got thinking - perhaps there's a faster way maybe to get characters made so I can get my books done faster than months of learning to sculpt in ZBrush (even though it's so much fun).

So, I searched for a better clothing solution and after some hunting, stumbled upon Marvelous Designer. I was blown away by what clothes could be made with it and we instantly bought it.

Can you tell us some details about this program and your fist experience?

In case you don't know what Marvelous Designer is, it's a cloth simulation software used by the biggest studios and leading artists to create realistic dynamic 3D clothes for 3D models, games (like Assassin's Creed and Metal Gear Solid V), 3D animations and for digital doubles and major motion pictures like the Hobbit, TED and the Adventures of Tin Tin etc.

The problem was, I had no idea about sewing, in fact I hate sewing, my mother hates sewing, my gran hated sewing (must be something wrong with the girls in our family!) so it was quite challenging to create clothes at first. When I first started using Marvelous, everything was going wrong all the time, the clothes were bunching up, even the simplest shirts looked awful and lumpy, nothing was working. It was so frustrating! I remember having crying fits like a silly baby, as I watched my clothes blow up.

Worst of all, there were no tutorials. I searched all over the internet trying to find good tutorials but there' were hardly any around. Some were downright confusing and didn't really cover the software properly. Then, not knowing how to make my own patterns, I hunted for sewing patterns.

It was impossible to find good patterns, there were no free ones and even those that cost were so confusing with all kinds of different lines for different sizes, cutting lines, seam allowances and other things which one needs for real world sewing but not for MD clothes. Real world patterns are made for printing, often delivered as a PDF with the pattern blown up huge and parts of it divided over many pages, so to get an overview of the full pattern, one has to put all the pages (puzzle pieces) together.

Asides from that, making clothes in MD is often somewhat different that real world sewing; one has to find all kinds of techniques and tricks to create different effects like special folds, pleats, quilting etc. And of course there were the physical property settings to figure out... I am not the type to give up on difficult things, (even though there were many times I did want to cry and dump it!). After a while it became easier and faster to make the clothes, as I got the hang of it and understood the logic of clothes making.

In total, I spent 1 year full time, 6 days a week, often into the night, figuring out how to create all kinds of clothes, from all the common kinds of sleeves to all the types of skirts, shirts, collars, pants, jackets, capes, cloaks, hoods, suits, dresses etc.

How does MD program differ from other tutorials?

Many of my artist friends kept asking me how I made the clothes and begging for tutorials, telling me how hard it was for them to figure out MD and how nothing was working for them etc. - so I condensed my entire year of knowledge into a training program of 52.5 hours, covering everything I know and teaching step-by-step how to create all kinds of clothes from scratch.

Even total beginners, who have no sewing knowledge and never used Marvelous Designer before, can in a very short time create great looking clothes by following my tutorials. One of my students created his first zombie outfit under a week!

The training starts with a complete beginners’ course that covers every button and function in the Marvelous Designer software, as well as all the do's and don'ts. Once students know how to use the software properly, they will learn in the 11 workshops how to create a great variety of clothes.

What can 3D designers learn on this program?

I teach how to make different shirts, collars, cuffs, zippers, buttons, pockets, many kinds of sleeves, several jackets, techniques to make quilting and stuffed puffed effects, capes and cloaks, hoods and hats, a 3 piece suit with a vest and 3 kinds of suit collars, military cargo pants, a military combat shirt and an officer's uniform, many kinds of skirts, dresses, ribbons and a corset. They'll also learn how to make gathered effects, as well as box pleated skirts, accordion pleats, knife pleats and sunburst pleats.

Once one understands the logic of clothes making it is easy to create pretty much any kind of clothing one needs based on the many different kinds of clothes that are taught.

What was your experience creating this workshop?

It took me longer than I thought to finish the entire training program, and while I was working to edit the videos, clean up the audio, render the tutorials out, it was great to see how many people were waiting for the course and nagging me about it every week. It feels really wonderful whenever students tell me how much my course helped them!

I am excited for the ones who see a biz opportunity - like making clothes for some market place like DAZ or Renderosity and so on. It feels awesome to have artists I admire tell me they gave up on MD but thanks to my training they can now create clothing and speed up their workflow. And I am happy for those beginners who can increase their capabilities and job opportunities.

I love teaching and most of all I love that I can help people!

Did you hear any feedback and/or recommendations from the designers who took this program?

Here are what some of my students have to say:

"Mastering marvelous designer is an excellent course that guides you step by step in learning one of the key software’s in any character modeling pipeline when it comes to the creation of realistic clothing.

Starting from the basics of the software, the course gradually introduces you through detailed video tutorials to the creation of piece of clothing of increasing complexity, in particular the workshop tutorials and theme exercises are extremely useful to anybody who wants to achieve realistic looking clothing and garments."

– Alessandro Baldasseroni, Character Artist – Riot Games www.eklettica.com

"CG Elves has the most extensive tutorials on Marvelous Designer that I`ve ever seen! The quality of the courses are amazing. I definitely recommend this for anyone trying to learn Marvelous and the art of Cloth making, especially if you’re in the game industry like myself."

– Glauco Longhi, Character Artist @ Naughty Dog, www.glaucolonghi.com

"That’s really what I was looking for. I knew (MD) a tiny bit before, but I was mad each time I used it, nothing were working etc., it was so frustrating. By following the course, I was able to quickly create believable cloths for my characters (within 1st week). Highly recommended for artists!"

– Arthur Gatineau, www.arthurgatineau.com

We reckon this program is certainly worth the time and effort and we're happy to announce the partership between Marvelous Designer and CGTrader to provide our community with this opportunity! All you need to do is follow this link and get your $200 discount, by entering our Coupon code: cgtrader-special at your shopping cart link. This is a limited time offer that end on 15th of December.