Marvelous designer success stories--Selome

Selome

Michael Berhanu

 

1. Could you briefly introduce yourself and your team?

My name is Michael Berhanu, I am the co-founder and Creative Director of ARMA. ARMA is an advertising and motion design studio based in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. We have been creating animated commercials and branded contents for our clients since 2015.

 

2. Could you briefly introduce the theme/ concept of the artwork? and why did you choose Marvelous Designer?

The theme for the piece came from the show's host herself. Selome Tadesse is very conversational, easy going, and humble. Her being the main host of the talk show, we focussed on trying to find a way of depicting the free-flowing conversations that she brings to guests. That's when we discovered an art piece by Selamawit Gebretsadiq made for Selome below:

The dress above is made up of the Amharic letters. Amharic is the official language spoken in Ethiopia. For the title sequence at the beginning of the show, we wanted to add depth and movement to Selome's dress. We thought a 3D dress with Amharic letters would be a good fit. We also thought this would be a nice way to secretly put meaningful words in the dress so that the audiences can discover them when they look carefully. For further inspiration, we looked into other contemporary Ethiopian artists who also use the Amharic letters in their art: namely Wosene Kosrof and Eskinder Mafi.

 

In order to work on our idea concerning the amount of fabric that was going to be used(95% of the whole animation is fabric), Marvelous Designer was our primary choice. We already had some experience working with Marvelous Designer on our past projects so we did not hesitate.

 

3. Please explain how Marvelous Designer was used in your artwork and what were the advantages of using it.

The dress is made up of individual 2D pattern pieces that are sewn together at the waist of the character. Then we activated the Wind controller and positioned it at her waist so that it can blow the dress backward. We found out that controlling the wind type to a spherical type gave us better results.

Through trial and error, we discovered that turning Gravity off gave us better results. We also added some 3D pins to give the dress some initial movement for the wind to act upon.

We found out that Marvelous Designer was faster and better in terms of quality with regards to cloth simulation compared to anything available. The 2D pattern workflow is also more intuitive compared to the traditional "modeling" of cloth.

 

4. Would you recommend Marvelous Designer to other users? and why?

We highly recommend Marvelous Designer to anyone looking to do more work with cloth and fabric animation. The quality and speed we experienced by using Marvelous Designer were incomparable to anything else so far. We hope to use it extensively again.