For those who don’t know the site: FippedNormals is/was a CG store for assets and training you use alongside Blender, ZBrush, Unreal Engine, and the Substance 3D tools, when your pipeline needs fewer guesses and more ready-to-ship bits. Also Plugins, Tutorials, 3d-Printfiles and much more.

The dates you need on your calendar

The FlippedNormals Marketplace will stop accepting new orders on March 31, 2026. After that, purchases are done. Access to previously purchased files stays available until April 30, 2026. After that date, marketplace files will no longer be accessible. Creator payouts have a final date too. The last creator payout happens on April 15, 2026.

April 30, 2026 is also tied to creator operations, because the Creator Dashboard shuts down on the same day customers lose access to file hosting. If you bought something in the past, invoices matter. An invoice was emailed after every purchase, and it should be in the email inbox used at checkout. You can keep what you have locally forever, but you need to get it locally first. Treat April 30, 2026 as a hard donwload deadline, not a friendly suggestion.

What is actually shutting down

This is a shutdown of the marketplace, not a blanket disappearance of everything connected to it. The official plan is a smaller, more focused reboot that pivots away from running a broad storefront with thousands of creators. The new website is planned to focus on FlippedNormals Exclusives and FlipBox.

Why it is happening

The reason given is simple and painfully familiar to anyone who has ever stared at an infrastructure bill and then stared at their revenue chart. Expenses increased significantly over the last years while earnings decreased. Salary reductions were also mentioned as part of efforts to keep things going.

A key detail here is that revenue from FlippedNormals Exclusives was used to keep the marketplace afloat during that period. That combination of higher operating costs, lower earnings, and internal cost cutting still led to the conclusion that the marketplace model was no longer sustainable. If you are reading this as a warning label for other niche CG storefronts, resist the urge to generalize. The only confirmed facts here are the reasons described for this specific shutdown, not the whole sector.

What customers should do right now

Log in, open your library, and pull down everything you have paid for to local storage before April 30, 2026. If your workflow spans multiple machines, back up like you mean it. Put a copy on a second drive. Put another copy wherever your studio keeps long-term project archives. If you rely on invoice PDFs for accounting, store those alongside the content so future you does not have to play detective.

If you depend on the platform for recurring downloads during a production, plan to stop depending on it before the cutoff. The last thing you want is a late-night render emergency that turns into an “amrketplace is gone” surprise.

There is also a specific path for owners of exclusives content. If you purchased FlippedNormals Exclusives on the current marketplace, there is a process to move them to the new site once it launches.

That process requires contacting support after the new site is live, using the support email address. A 100 percent promo code is described as the mechanism to migrate courses to a new account. One more detail that will trip up anyone on autopilot: you will have to make a new user account for the new site as part of that migration flow.

What creators should expect

If you sell on marketplaces, you already know the question creators ask first: what about payouts. The official timeline includes a final creator payout date of April 15, 2026. That is presented as the last payout event. There is also an operational cutoff on April 30, 2026, when the Creator Dashboard shuts down.

If you are a creator and you have analytics, product files, thumbnails, descriptions, license text, or customer support notes you rely on, assume you need to export whatever you can before that dashboard goes dark.

The new site focus, as described, narrows the catalog to FlippedNormals Exclusives and FlipBox. That is a very different value proposition from a wide creator marketplace, even if the UI ends up sleeker. If your pipeline planning relies on “I can always re-download that later,” change the habit. This event is a reminder that availability is a feature you only notice once it is gone.

https://help.flippednormals.com/article/130-flippednormals-marketplace-closing-down-faq

The post FlippedNormals Marketplace closes March 31 first appeared on DIGITAL PRODUCTION and was written by Bela Beier.

Making a film with some friends, with no studio, no mocap stage, and no budget, usually sounds like a dead end. For realtime director Dimitri Vallein, it became the premise for New Specimen, a four-minute sci-fi short built entirely in Unreal Engine 5 using iPhones, off-the-shelf software, and a lot of patience. Every shot from facial capture and markerless body motion to full cloth simulation  was produced solo in his living room. The result isn’t a tech demo but a polished short film that questions how far a single artist can push cinematic storytelling inside the realtime toolset.

DP: Hi! Can you introduce yourself?

Dimitri Vallein: Hi everyone! I’m Dimitri, a real-time 3D director and technologist. Before filmmaking, I built projects around immersive 3D technologies. I reached 500M+ views, creating Augmented Reality experiences and developing video games that hit #1 on the French App Store. A few years ago, I turned to Unreal Engine with a clear goal: to direct the sci-fi films I’d always dreamed of seeing.

Since then, I’ve written, directed, and self-produced two UE5 shorts: The Last Star (IMDB) (2022), screened at Dances With Films LA at the TCL Chinese Theatre and was selected for the BMVAs (Best Animation) alongside The Weeknd, Pharrell Williams, and Muse. And now, New Specimen (2024), which was a semi-finalist at the Rhode Island International Film Festival and later led to an invitation to join a panel with Ron Dyens (Oscar-winning producer of Flow) to discuss real-time 3D, the exact process I’ll break down here.

DP: So, how did this all start?

Dimitri Vallein: Everything began with this single render from my friend Qtn.cls: a lone figure in a night field. If you want to see his stuff, check his Instagram | Artstation | Youtube
I felt instantly connected to it. I could feel the silence, the cold breath, the mystery. In that moment, the world of New Specimen started to take shape in my mind. I called my childhood friend Vincent Guyon and laid out the vision for where this could go. We bounced ideas back and forth until the story snapped into shape. Together, we drafted a tight 4-minute outline, and I jumped straight into production.

DP: How did you create the main Character? And what exactly is it?

Dimitri Vallein: One key point for me was to create a unique, distinct look for the main character. Most of the time when you watch Unreal Engine short films, you can spot MetaHumans immediately, and it often pulls you out of the story. The problem is usually that people use MetaHuman’s default look, which still feels quite uncanny. It often lacks the personality and style you will look for when creating something distinctive. That’s why I chose a 3DScanStore head scan to avoid this trap and go for something unique.

I picked the scan like I’d cast an actor. I was looking for a distinctive face—something that doesn’t look too much like a human, but at the same time doesn’t look too much like a fantasy creature. I wanted the viewer to see a bit of themselves in this creature, so they could feel more emotion toward it and more easily relate to what’s happening to him.

Then I “MetaHumanized” it while keeping the surface details from 3DScanStore by adapting the original UVs to the MetaHuman UVs I just created. This step mattered because I still wanted to use the MH animation features, especially the facial rig, which were crucial to my process.

Facial Animation

DP: The character’s face has a few unique shapes – how did you translate the rigs? And the eyes are very weird – can you talk us through their setup and creative process? Did you try normal eyes first, and then go for the full black?
Dimitri Vallein: For the rig, the whole goal was to keep MetaHuman’s facial system, but preserve the scan’s personality. I MetaHumanized the head so I could use the MH rig, then I protected the “non-standard” features by keeping the scan’s surface language and not smoothing it into a generic MetaHuman face.
For the eyes, it’s the first thing I did after the MH process: I changed the eye material to something more unique and distinctive. I’ve always loved experimenting with new materials in my scenes, something you wouldn’t expect at first, but that creates visually interesting results. This is the same process I used to create the 3D environment for The Last Star.
I probably tried dozens and dozens of different materials to finally create its magic. I had this idea from the beginning: to have eyes that look entirely metallic, while still catching reflections from the lights to give him that sparkle of a soul. It was a deliberate story choice.

One of the biggest challenges was getting believable facial expressions, and, above all, making them land emotionally for the viewer (curiosity → apprehension → anxiety → fear → desperation). I didn’t have an experienced actor around me, so I did it myself.

I used my iPhone with the Live Link Face application (Made by Epic) to capture takes for each sequence, processed the data in Unreal Engine, and synced it with the body animation in the sequencer. I added light facial keyframes to push certain expressions or correct specific muscle movements, but about 90% of the results came straight from the capture.

DP: Considering the movements, shouldn’t that be easy on any Mocap Stage?

Dimitri Vallein: I didn’t have the budget to rent a motion-capture stage with suits, hire performers, and bring in a tech team for calibration and cleanup, so I explored markerless video-to-motion options and chose the tool Move.AI for its accuracy. I set up four iPhones on tripods around a small capture area, ran the standard calibration, and recorded all the performances myself in my living room.

The best part of this process was the iteration speed: If a take didn’t work properly, I could re-record the animation immediately. I exported FBX files from Move.AI, retargeted them in Unreal with the IK Retargeter, and did a light cleanup in the sequencer (foot contact, hand jitter, etc.) until it felt right on-screen with the lighting and environment.

DP: How did Move.Ai work for you? Will you use it again?

Dimitri Vallein: Move.AI was fantastic to use because it gave me the one thing I was looking for as a solo director: iteration speed. I could record, review in context, and redo takes immediately. It’s not always perfect; some parts of the body still need attention and cleaning sometimes, but the trade-off was worth it in that context. It also gave me the opportunity to try different acting choices and decide which emotion I wanted to evoke.
Yes, I’ll use it again, especially for the animatic phase when I’m alone and iterating quickly. But for a more ambitious project, I’m aiming to do performance capture with real actors and direct them on the spot. That’s what I’m planning for my next project. The interesting part about cinema is that it’s a collective art form, and as my projects grow, I want to get closer to that. That’s also where all the fun and memories are made.

DP: So, to make it easy, you used a flowing hospital gown?

Dimitri Vallein: One thing I always aim for in 3D is to keep every pixel in motion. CGI gets static and fake pretty fast. So I like to keep everything moving on screen, even subtly; the result feels more believable to the human eye. That’s why I decided to take the hard road for the clothes and simulate them for my characters on every shot.

DP: I assume the new ML-Cloth wasn’t available in the version of Unreal that you used?

Dimitri Vallein: No, not yet. For that, Jon Sanchez (who worked with me on The Last Star) designed a hospital-style gown in Marvelous Designer. He also created a torn, distressed variant of the garment with rips along the hem and sleeves. I love this choice because it lets the outfit evolve with the story. Check out his Instagram and Artstation to see some of it!

Once the garments were designed and optimised, the next challenge was simulation. I exported the MetaHuman animations and brought them into Marvelous Designer.

DP: Considering that this was simulated Cloth over a motion-captured rig, how many Iterations did you need to make it look liveable?

Dimitri Vallein: Some simulations went right after a few iterations. (walks, look-arounds). Others were bigger challenges; the hardest were probably sprints, shoulder rolls, and sudden stops. They needed troubleshooting: collision thickness tweaks, pattern adjustments, higher sub-steps, and occasional re-caches until everything fell into place. I then exported the cloth back to Unreal as Alembic (Ogawa) and integrated it into each sequence.

DP: Soooo, let’s talk about the location – where did those come from?

Dimitri Vallein: The environment and lighting were created by Qtn.cls. I had already worked with him on Vortex, and we’ve always been closely aligned on the aesthetics we like. It was great to work with him again.

DP: Which stumbling blocks did you encounter during setup?

Dimitri Vallein: It’s one thing to create cool visuals and animate them in a fast-cut or epic way, or have them
work with strong music and a voice-over that takes all the space, or even use masked 3D characters to avoid showing the eyes and/or mouth.

It’s another thing to tell a real story, with multiple 3D characters interacting with each other, without any artefacts to hide facial features or music to take over the story. So the biggest challenge, and also the most interesting one, was confronting the digital human problem head-on, with everything that implies. I had to learn a lot of different things to make it work visually, and I’m happy with how the emotions, facial expressions, and micro-muscle movements turned out. I think this is what most 3D artists avoid, but it’s also the thing that, if we break through, the world is ours.

DP: Looking forward, with the recent updates to Unreal, what are you looking for to utilise in your next project, and was, in your opinion, already perfect as it is?
Dimitri Vallein: I’m really looking for more AI-driven tools built directly into Unreal Engine. The tool I’m most eager to have is an AI tech that understands my characters and their intentions, and, based on the environment, the story, and good prompting, can generate procedural animations. It would be an amazing step forward for creating animatics easily. It would be a real revolution in my process.
I’m also interested in the evolution of Nvidia’s tech toolsets they keep releasing, like the Audio2Face we can use directly with MetaHumans, which is super cool. I’m looking forward to progress that might even let you prompt the emotion you want to generate on a MetaHuman face based on the audio you give it as input.

Finally, as a side note, I’m using Isaac Sim and Isaac Lab more and more to create and train my own robots. As a 3D aficionado, I see those 2 softwares as an extension of my work into the real world. You can even imagine cute creatures, develop a movie based on them, and then train them directly in Isaac Sim/Lab, and then you have a direct path to bring your story and IP into the real world!

DP: Did you go for the festivals?
Dimitri Vallein: Yes, strategically. New Specimen screened at Animation First in New York, where I presented the film to the audience and joined a panel with Ron Dyens (Oscar-winning producer of Flow), Boris Labbé, and Leslie Lynch to discuss real-time workflows and the use of AI in animation. I’m happy New Specimen was a semi-finalist at Flickers’ Rhode Island International Film Festival, and it also opened the door to the VIEW Conference in Turin. I’m also currently preparing a VR version of New Specimen to keep pushing immersive experiences and storytelling, so you might see me at immersive film festivals in the coming months and years too!

DP: And what is the next project you are working on?
Dimitri Vallein: My next project is called The Day I Met You. It should come out this year, in 2026. It’s my most ambitious project to date: 20 minutes of pure 3D. I believe more and more that Hollywood has become repetitive, pessimistic, and mechanical, addicted to the same franchises. They’ve stopped developing bold new ideas that push the boundaries of our imagination. There’s an opportunity here for the new generation of filmmakers to create innovative films by harnessing optimism, new technologies, and our deepest scientific
ideas. So this next project will focus on a hopeful future, one where scientific discovery moves civilisation forward.

The post Unreal Reality: Building A New Specimen first appeared on DIGITAL PRODUCTION and was written by Bela Beier.

For those who don’t know the tool: Marvellous Designer by CLO Virtual Fashion is a pattern-based cloth simulation tool used for apparel, characters, and virtual garments, usually upstream of DCC tools and game engines.

A cheaper licence, same application

CLO Virtual Fashion has introduced an indie pricing tier (on Request) for Marvelous Designer. The company announced the change through its official support news channel. The new licence is aimed at individual users and small studios that fall below a defined annual revenue threshold. According to CLO Virtual Fashion, the indie licence provides access to the same Marvelous Designer application as existing subscriptions. No functional differences, feature removals, or technical limitations are described in the announcement. The company does not position the licence as a learning or non-commercial edition.

The indie licence is restricted by revenue. Eligibility is limited to individuals or companies with annual gross revenue below the threshold specified by CLO Virtual Fashion. The company states that users are responsible for ensuring they meet the eligibility requirements. No automated enforcement mechanism is described.

Pricing and availability

CLO Virtual Fashion offers the indie licence at lower monthly and annual prices than its standard subscription. At the time of writing, we don’t know the actual price; you’ll have to apply here. Regional pricing, taxes, and currency conversion are not detailed yet.

Context and industry pattern

Indie pricing has become common among DCC and simulation tool vendors as subscription models mature and people are going the free / open source route with falling revenue and higher cost all over. So far, the company frames the change as an accessibility measure rather than a product restructuring. As with any licensing change, new tools and pricing models should be tested before use in actual prdouctoin environments to avoid compliance and pipeline issues.

Marvelous Designer introduces indie pricing

https://www.marvelousdesigner.com/en/support/news/view/b9471a7acc77478a863fd114756d5c19

The post Marvelous Designer adds indie pricing, quietly first appeared on DIGITAL PRODUCTION and was written by Bela Beier.

The 2025.2 update of Marvelous Designer, developed by CLO Virtual Fashion, focuses on five new features that enhance realism, efficiency, and creative control across digital garment workflows. The release expands the program’s animation and simulation toolkit while tightening interoperability with external systems such as Epic Games’ MetaHuman Creator.

Keyframe Animation Gains Real Cloth Control

The most substantial technical update lies in the expanded key-framable properties. Fabric behaviour can now be animated directly through properties such as shrinkage, pressure, solidify, tack, and trim weight. Artists can animate shrinkage weft and warp to tighten or loosen cloth dynamically, or use pressure values to create inflation and deflation effects. The solidify control adjusts fabric stiffness over time, useful for animating transitions from soft to rigid materials in one shot. Tack properties can be keyed to attach or release trims, and trim weight itself can be animated — for example, making a prop lighter or heavier in response to motion. This deeper control allows complex, physically-based animations such as self-inflating garments, reactive drapery, or controlled cloth deformation without leaving Marvelous Designer’s simulation environment.

Patterns Become Trims and Accessories

Patterns can now be converted directly into trims or avatar accessories through a context-menu operation. Once converted, these assets are stored as Trim Styles or registered as accessories, allowing them to be reused across projects. The change provides clear advantages in asset management and simulation efficiency. Trims are treated as rigid geometry rather than simulated cloth, which reduces processing overhead. This workflow supports the creation of non-deformable surfaces such as metal, wood, or plastic, enabling hard-surface detailing directly inside Marvelous Designer. In practice, it is now possible to design a fully armoured character by converting fabric plates into rigid trims or to repurpose footwear and props as reusable accessories.

Local FBX Export Without CONNECT

EveryWear, Marvelous Designer’s asset-exporter, now supports direct FBX export to local storage. Earlier versions required users to upload garments to the CONNECT platform before download. The 2025.2 revision replaces that dependency with a local-only workflow. Artists can optimise garments, rig avatars, pack UVs, bake textures, and export the final FBX directly to disk. This update eliminates one of the most common production bottlenecks, streamlining integration with DCC tools and game engines that rely on FBX.

MetaHuman DNA Import

Epic Games’ MetaHuman Creator avatars can now be imported directly into Marvelous Designer in their native DNA format. This import process is non-destructive, preserving the avatar’s proportions, mesh fidelity and rigging data. Designers can fit garments directly on MetaHuman bodies, export them back to Unreal Engine, and have the clothing automatically adapt to any subsequent body adjustments made in MetaHuman Creator. The result is a tighter pipeline between digital-human design and cloth simulation, significantly reducing retargeting and scaling errors.

Pleats Made Simple

Creating pleats manually has long been a slow, calculation-heavy task. The new Pleats Tool simplifies the process with an interactive interface for generating knife, box or accordion pleats. Designers can adjust number, depth, interval and fold angle parameters directly in the tool’s window, previewing results in real time. The system allows non-destructive editing: pleats can be undone and modified without redrawing patterns. This not only saves time but also makes pleated garments—such as skirts, dresses and uniforms—more iterative and design-friendly.

Pricing

Marvelous Designer 2025.2 is available now for both Windows 10 and later, and macOS 12 and above. The software continues to be offered exclusively through subscription. Individual licences are priced at around US $39 per month, or US $280 per year, equating to roughly US $23 per month when billed annually. Enterprise pricing remains higher, with node-locked licences typically around US $199 per month or US $1,900 per year, and floating licences in the region of US $2,000 per year.

As always, professionals should test the new version within controlled environments before integrating it into production pipelines. Although the update appears stable in demonstrations, verifying simulation performance, export fidelity, and MetaHuman interoperability is essential before deployment.

The post Marvelous Designer 2025.2: MetaHumans, Pleats & Keyframes first appeared on DIGITAL PRODUCTION and was written by Bela Beier.

Update: HERE IT IS! Get your Penguin-flavoured Cloth-Sim!
A trial is available, of course.

CLO Virtual Fashion will release Marvelous Designer for Linux on 30 September 2025. The company confirms support for Rocky Linux 9, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9, and equivalent distributions. The Linux version is aimed squarely at studio pipelines. CLO states the release was designed with “stability and simulation accuracy in mind,” focusing on predictable results in production environments.

All features, plus Python API

The Linux edition ships with the same toolset as the current Marvelous Designer builds on other operating systems. In addition, CLO introduces a Python API.

According to the official announcement, this interface enables users to:

• Run scripts directly inside Marvelous Designer
• Batch import and export files
• Adjust and control simulation parameters
• Automate repetitive tasks and workflows

This makes the Linux edition not only feature-complete, but also more automation-friendly than previous versions.

Enterprise-oriented integration

The release is clearly targeted at enterprise use, with the focus on pipeline automation, batch operations, and scriptability. CLO emphasises scalability and consistency, though these are vendor claims and not independently verified at press time. Studios relying on Linux-based render and simulation farms can now integrate Marvelous Designer directly without the need for Windows or macOS workarounds.

Availability

Marvelous Designer for Linux will be available from 30 September 2025. At press time, CLO has not published pricing details specific to the Linux version. The product can be accessed via the official Marvelous Designer website then. As with all new software releases, professionals should test the Linux build thoroughly before integrating it into production pipelines.

The post Marvelous Designer finally sews itself into Linux first appeared on DIGITAL PRODUCTION and was written by Bela Beier.