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For those who don’t know the tool: CLO Virtual Fashion develops Marvelous Designer, a pattern-based 3D garment design and cloth-simulation application aimed at game, VFX and animation work, alongside CLO for fashion workflows. Artists typically bring in an avatar or animated character, construct and simulate garments from 2D pattern pieces, then move geometry, animation or caches downstream through formats such as FBX, Alembic, USD, OBJ and glTF for further character work, look development, rendering or engine use.
More art direction, less rescue sculpting
Marvelous Designer 2026.1 concentrates on giving artists more direct control over the result of cloth simulation without abandoning the pattern and simulation model underneath it. The headline additions are a beta Seamline Rip system, Brush Pinching, temporary simulation overrides during pinching, animated avatar blend shapes and improved camera interchange. Around those sit smaller but practical controls for folds, zippers, autosaves and workspace configuration.
Tear along the dotted line
The new Seamline Rip tool is explicitly marked beta. It lets an artist designate part or all of an existing sewing line as an area that can tear during simulation. A rip can be placed directly on a sewing line or created across selected sewing lines in batches. Marvelous Designer also creates a synchronized paired rip object on the corresponding sewing line, although the properties controlling the tear can be adjusted individually.
The useful control is not simply an on/off cut. With Activate enabled, the sewing line opens when the simulated forces satisfy the configured Rip Resistance condition. CLO documents Rip Resistance as being calculated from Yield Strength, where damage begins, and Damage Rate, which determines how damage accumulates. Lower resistance makes the seam easier to open; higher values let it survive greater sustained force.
That makes the feature applicable to animation as well as static distressing. A character expanding, pulling against clothing or interacting with a garment can provide the force that triggers the tear, rather than forcing an artist to model separate intact and damaged versions and switch between them. The same mechanism can also be used simply to build distressed clothing while posing and simulating a garment.
The accompanying fray system is considerably more configurable than a fuzzy edge preset. Controls cover generation thresholds, bridge probability, root offset, variation, gravity, material response and separate characteristics for fuzz, loose warp, loose weft and exposed strands. Fray configurations can be saved as ZFRAY presets for reuse. There are important beta boundaries. In CLO’s feature overview, fraying is disabled on Mac, and the fray itself cannot yet be exported as mesh geometry.
Painting a wrinkle
Brush Pinching extends Marvelous Designer’s existing Pinching tools with stroke-based deformation. With simulation running, the artist paints a path across the garment and the cloth deforms along that stroke.
The brush exposes Size, Focal Radius and Lazy Distance, plus an option to display the affected weights. Pinching controls include deformation Strength, Push Inward and Average Radius. The latter stabilizes the pinching direction by averaging surrounding normals across a reference area.
The practical gain is spatial control. Instead of hoping a wrinkle emerges in approximately the correct region after manipulating the cloth, an artist can describe the intended path and let simulation resolve the surrounding surface. For stylized characters, hero folds and art-directed silhouettes, that should reduce the familiar hand-off where “physically plausible” cloth is exported only to be sculpted into the shot-approved shape somewhere else.
Telling simulation when to behave
Pinching Simulation Override pushes that idea further. When enabled, Marvelous Designer temporarily substitutes selected global and fabric simulation properties while a Pinching tool is active. Override Strength blends between the project’s original simulation settings and the override values. At zero, the original settings remain in control; at one, the override properties are fully applied. Artists can override global simulation values and selected fabrics rather than permanently rebuilding the project’s normal simulation setup around one troublesome fold.
The feature also exposes Update Rest Shape and Reset Rest Shape. Update Rest Shape turns the current 3D state into the shape toward which simulation tries to return, with the operation applicable to selected patterns or all patterns. Marvelous Designer can display modified rest shapes separately in the viewport.
Blend shapes get a timeline
Marvelous Designer already gained support for avatars carrying blend-shape data. The new step is Blend Shape Animation. Artists can now add a keyframe directly to a deformable blend-shape parameter at the current frame. The existing avatar controls expose imported parameters with weights from 0 to 100, so body corrections or expression-driven shape changes can now vary over time rather than remaining a static fitting adjustment.
For garment work, corrective body shapes are probably the more consequential use case. A shot that needs an avatar to alter volume or silhouette during motion no longer has to treat every such change as a separate imported state.
CLO documents import and export of blend-shape animation through FBX, glTF/GLB, Alembic and USD. That statement applies to this blend-shape animation workflow; it should not be read as a promise that every unrelated property in a Marvelous Designer scene round-trips identically through all four formats.
Cameras travel with the scene
Pipeline work also gets a less glamorous but very useful improvement: camera import and export. The new viewport camera workflow specifically supports camera objects in FBX and glTF 2.0 files, including GLB. Importing a file with Cameras enabled adds those cameras to the Scene Graph. Export can include camera objects in the corresponding FBX or glTF/GLB output. A camera can also be designated as the Main Camera, and only one can hold that status at a time. The scene retains a Default Camera, which cannot be deleted.
Folds learn gradients
Variable Fold Angle adds another small control with disproportionate usefulness for art direction. On an internal line, an artist can switch the Fold setting from Uniform to Variable. Rather than applying one angle across the entire line, the fold transitions from the chosen value at one end to a flat 180 degrees at the other.
The active end can use a Fold Angle from 0 to 360 degrees, and the direction of the gradient can be reversed. On linked symmetric internal lines, the change is mirrored unless linked editing is removed. This is particularly relevant to controlled creases and cape or costume folds where a constant fold angle looks mechanically perfect in exactly the wrong way. The solver still produces the cloth around the instruction, but the instruction itself no longer has to be uniform.
Zippers get some slack
The release also improves zipper placement in the 2D and 3D windows and adds an Extend property to the zipper chain. In the current zipper properties, Extend allows the artist to adjust the additional length and select its direction.
This is not a revolutionary simulation feature, but zippers are the sort of production detail where a small placement limitation can generate surprisingly large amounts of fiddling.
Autosave becomes less ceremonial
Time-based autosave now keeps more than a single vaguely comforting recovery state. In the application’s default-file settings, users can configure the autosave interval, the maximum number of stored autosave files, the retention period in days, the file type and the storage path.
That gives a studio a better chance of choosing a recovery policy appropriate to heavy garment scenes rather than relying on one generic interval. Autosave is never the glamorous paragraph in a release article, right up until the simulation that took an afternoon disappears.
The UI gains toolbar customization as well. Tools can be reordered, hidden and regrouped within the 2D or 3D toolbars, and configurations can be saved to and opened from JSON tool-set files. Tools cannot be moved between the 2D and 3D toolbars.
GPU support needs careful wording
The current system requirements document Nvidia CUDA acceleration for Marvelous Designer GPU simulation and rendering in the Nvidia GPU context. The same requirements list Apple Silicon as the Mac platform, with an M1 as the minimum supported Mac model, but the indexed release documentation used here does not identify the backend for the newly listed macOS GPU Simulation feature. GPU support is therefore documented; a specific Mac processing API should not be inferred from that alone.
Current minimum operating-system requirements are Windows 11 64-bit 24H2, macOS Sonoma 14 on Apple Silicon, and Rocky Linux 9.5 or its Red Hat Enterprise Linux equivalent. Linux availability is restricted to Enterprise customers upon request. The current minimum memory requirement is 16 GB, with 64 GB recommended for heavier clothing and animation work.
Licensing remains a production setting
For individuals, freelancers and sole proprietors, CLO currently lists a Personal Monthly Subscription at $39 per month with automatic billing, or a 1 Year Prepaid License at $280 as a one-time payment that does not automatically renew. That prepaid option is time-limited access, not a permanent licence.
Companies and organisations with two or more members are directed to Enterprise licensing. Current Enterprise pricing is $199 per seat for the automatically billed Network Online Monthly option, which CLO describes as node-locked to one device per licence. Network Online Annual costs $2,000 per seat and is described as floating. Enterprise Linux Annual is $2,300 per seat and is also described as floating. Indie Studio pricing remains contact-sales.
A 14-day trial is available. The download page supplies the current installer, while older releases remain searchable separately.
https://support.marvelousdesigner.com/hc/en-us/articles/59743730927129-Marvelous-Designer-2026-1-New-Feature-List Marvelous Designer
https://support.marvelousdesigner.com/hc/en-us/articles/59781111736345-Brush-Pinching Marvelous Designer
https://support.marvelousdesigner.com/hc/en-us/articles/59782132043289-Pinching-Simulation-Override
https://support.marvelousdesigner.com/hc/en-us/articles/59816167297433-Seamline-Rip
| Product | Marvelous Designer |
| Developer | CLO Virtual Fashion |
| Version | 2026.1 |
| Release status | Available through the current download page |
| Operating systems | Windows 11 64-bit 24H2 minimum; macOS Sonoma 14 minimum on Apple Silicon, M1 minimum; Rocky Linux 9.5 or RHEL equivalent for Enterprise customers upon request |
| Blend-shape animation | Import and export via FBX, glTF/GLB, Alembic and USD |
| Camera interchange | Import and export via FBX and glTF/GLB |
| Personal licences | $39/month Personal Monthly Subscription, automatically billed; $280 1 Year Prepaid License, one-time payment and no automatic renewal |
| Enterprise licences | Network Online Monthly $199/seat, node-locked; Network Online Annual $2,000/seat, floating; Enterprise Linux Annual $2,300/seat, floating; Indie Studio: Contact Sales |
| Trial | 14-day free trial |
| Documentation | 2026.1 feature list |
