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by Animats 785 days ago
The main package used for clothing design is Clo. It's a full 3D design program with cloth physics. You get to see full outfits on simulated models.

There's also Marvelous Designer, which is Clo minus the part that outputs cutting patterns. That's used to create clothing for animation.
2 comments
ingenieros 784 days ago
The big players in this field are actually Optitex and Gerber AccuMark. Lookup any pattern making job from the likes of adidas, Patagonia or Arc’teryx and they require knowledge in one of those two.

The reason why CLO is becoming so popular in recent years is because they’ve been really smart about striking partnerships with fashion schools and offering their software at steep student discounts. I once tried to get a price quote from a regional Optitex rep and they just shrugged me off because they only deal with BIG companies.

If there ever was an industry ripe for disruption it would be fashion. The incumbents have been resting on their laurels for decades so it’s nice to see upstarts like CLO trying to apply the Final Cut Pro formula to dethrone them.

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llm_trw 784 days ago
>Gerber AccuMark

I love the fact that the big seller for Gerber until the 1980s was the variable scale: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zeCslpB-JVU

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neuronexmachina 784 days ago
This is probably a dumb question, but am I correct in assuming that Gerber Scientific (which I think is responsible for AccuMark), Gerber knives, and Gerber baby products are all from completely unrelated companies? Or is there some long-ago connection between them?
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garciansmith 784 days ago
Unrelated.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerber_Legendary_Blades https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerber_Products_Company https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerber_Scientific

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dylan604 784 days ago
> it’s nice to see upstarts like CLO trying to apply the Final Cut Pro formula to dethrone them.

Except Final Cut Pro died because they rested on their laurels and got their lunch eaten when Apple finally licensed ProRes. So it's not really as good of a comparison as one might think

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virtualritz 784 days ago
I taught myself CLO 3D basics in about a week and then used it to design tango pants for myself, from an Oxford bags pattern from the 40's that I found online. I think this was around 2012 or so.

You can adjust the mannequin to your measurements and even load mocap data (which was very cumbersome at the time though) to see how the piece may behave when worn.

I had the pattern cut out from paper on a large format cutter plotter. Then I went to a tailor and told them: make it so -- all the details are up to you but stick to the pattern. Of course the pattern was missing stuff like belt pocket, coin pocket, lining etc.

They were a tad bewildered but the pants fit perfectly and I've been re-using this pattern now for over a decade.

For me it was an amazing experience and I'm still marveling (pun intended) at the fact that a zero-tailoring-knowledge layperson like I could do something like this with such software.

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