New Marvelous Designer Update Lets Artists Rip, Pinch & Shape Fabric Like Never Before

Creating convincing digital clothing has always involved balancing artistic control with physically believable behavior. Artists need garments to react like fabric, but production work often demands something much more specific than simply allowing a simulation to determine where every fold and wrinkle ends up.

With Marvelous Designer 2026.1, the team is expanding both sides of that equation, and they even opened it up for those interested to try it out in early access already.

The latest update introduces several new tools aimed at giving 3D artists more control over how garments behave and take shape. The biggest addition is one users have been requesting for some time: fabric can now dynamically rip along its seamlines.

The new [Beta] Seamline Ripping Tool allows seams to tear based on the amount of force applied to the garment. Instead of manually creating separate versions of damaged clothing, artists and animators can incorporate ripping directly into the fabric simulation. That should immediately open up some pretty interesting possibilities.

For example, a character struggling against clothing could cause seams to give way naturally. A tight garment could rip during an extreme animation. Damaged costumes could progressively break apart during a fight, transformation, or cinematic sequence. Artists creating post-apocalyptic characters could experiment with clothing that tears under stress rather than manually determining every damaged edge beforehand.

It could also be useful simply as an authoring tool. An artist could experiment with applying force to a garment, see where the underlying construction naturally fails, and use the result as the basis for a distressed costume.

The important distinction is that the behavior comes from the construction of the garment and the forces acting upon it in a much more natural way.

There are some limitations to keep in mind while the feature remains in Beta. Fraying is currently disabled on Mac, and fraying cannot yet be exported as mesh geometry. Marvelous Designer says mesh export and the missing Mac functionality are planned for the future.

But ripping is only one part of the 2026.1 update. Two of the more immediately useful additions for artists working directly on clothing are Brush Pinching and Pinching Simulation Override.

Brush Pinching provides a more intuitive way of pushing and pulling fabric along a brushstroke. Instead of relying exclusively on the broader simulation to achieve a particular silhouette, artists can interact with the garment and guide its shape directly.

While useful on its own, it becomes considerably more interesting when paired with Pinching Simulation Override.

The latter provides artists with enhanced control over fabric inside the 3D window, allowing them to guide material toward a desired shape and have the garment hold that form. The two systems can consequently be used together to create much more deliberate folds and silhouettes while remaining inside Marvelous Designer.

One real-world example would be having a fighter dressed in flowing red clothing. Using these new features, an artist could achieve a desired silhouette entirely with the new Brush Pinching and Pinching Simulation Override tools, without taking the garment into another application for sculpting.

For professional character artists, that could be one of the most useful workflow improvements in the update. Simulation is extremely good at answering the question of how fabric would behave. Character art frequently needs to answer a slightly different question: How does the artist want it to behave?

The update isn't simply about simulating more complicated clothing. It's about giving artists more control over what happens once that simulation starts. The Seamline Ripping Tool gives artists and animators new options instead of forcing them to use external workarounds for ripping fabric; Brush Pinching provides a more direct way to manipulate the fabric itself; and Pinching Simulation Override gives artists greater authority over the final shape.

For existing Marvelous Designer artists, these are the kinds of workflow additions that can change how much work needs to happen elsewhere in the character pipeline. And for artists who haven't used the software recently, 2026.1 provides a good reason to see how much more can now be accomplished without leaving the 3D window.

Marvelous Designer has also prepared a dedicated update video demonstrating the new features and other improvements included with 2026.1.

You can learn more about Marvelous Designer 2026.1 and its latest features through the official documentation, or try Marvelous Designer for free. Students can also currently get their first three months of Marvelous Designer free, with student pricing available afterward for $8.25 per month for four years from sign-up.