Digital Costume Design: Creating Eve’s Tank Top
Using Marvelous Designer and Zbrush for Character and Costume Design.
Apple Rot
An important scene in Short film “Apple Rot” is when the character Eve steps out of the shower.
Apple Rot is a Blauw Films original, 3D animated horror short film.
If you’re interested in the story behind Apple Rot, you can read about The Genesis Orchard in this blog.
In this blog I will outline how the first steps in defining Eve’s look came together, how I modelled her tank top inside Marvelous Designer and sourced the textures.
The Scene
To immediately avoid confusion: she is wearing this tank in the preceding scene, and before she steps in the shower.
Whether she’ll be wearing clothes in the shower is actually still up for debate.
On the one hand we believe it could add something odd and uncanny to the scene, on the other hand we’re still figuring out how to do wet clothes.
Modeling EVE’s face
To define the look of Eve, I sketched a full-body image. Throughout the short, Eve is only wearing one set.
She has no other costumes in her wardrobe for this production.
She first wears this set when sleeping, and so I defined it as a very casual pyjama-set.
I wanted it to feel young and sexy, but not provocative.
You might feel like she’s seducing you, but she shouldn’t be coquettish.
I settled for a simple tank top with spaghetti straps.
I remember thinking of basic Brandy Melville tanks, that exude this relaxed, young and cute feeling.
Eve’s face sculpt is loosely based on these two ladies.
The woman on the left is Isabelle Adjani, as Anna in Possession (1981). I chose this reference because Eve’s character is heavily inspired by the possessed-like feeling of Anna.
The woman on the right is fashion model Anna Cleveland, who is known for her luxurious look, with her strong bone structure and deep-set eyes.
A combination of Isabelle Adjani’s rounded bone structure, and Anna Cleveland’s defining features made an intriguing face for Eve.
Costume Design
Next up was the actual design of the tank top.
As I already knew what the design would be, I started by choosing a material.
I felt like a lot of the feeling was dependent on the material I chose.
The above swatches were materials I wanted to pick between, they’re all cottons woven in various manners.
At this point, I was experimenting with turning fabric scans into PBR materials.
I processed the scans through a trial version of Vizoo.
The Vizoo software allows you to tile textures and tweak colours. That way, I produced the final texture.
I was quite pleased that even without the Vizoo hardware, I was able to produce a decent PBR texture.
Nothing that would hold up under scrutiny, but great for my current project.
You can see the relatively straight-forward design for Eve’s tank top.
The biggest points of interest are:
- The slit on the front
- The correct scoop of the neckline
- The strap that slipped off her shoulder
- The modelling details for the seams
On the left image I added seaming detail to the bottom hem.
On the right image this detail is missing.
You can see how much it adds to the design.
The final artwork we ended up creating was a great exercise for lighting and mood, and we believe Eve’s fave is very effective.
We’ll continue to develop her design, and start R&D on how to give her the wet look we want for the shower scene.
.png)
.jpg)
.jpg)
.jpg)
.png)
.png)
0 Comments