illusionLAB (12/6/2017)
Looks like it could be brilliant! A step in the right direction - honestly, I don't understand why MD hasn't figured out that every possible piece of clothing ever concocted could start from a 'template'... dressing people has some pretty standardized conventions (neck.torso, arms and legs... done!) ;-)I don't think so, illusionLAB, with all due respect.
Most iCloners seem to be interested in only contemporary, modern themes. A few are interested in the kind of Fantasy Dark Ages you get in Lord of the Rings. But if you are interested - as I am - in say the 18th century with its wigs and breeches, or in the 19th century with its eccentric varieties of facial hair, or in the 15th century with the kind of clothes they wore under full plate armour being worn as 'smart casual' then Marvelous Designer is a must-buy.
I suggest that there is a heresy of history called 'presentism' about. This presentism is where people imagine that the past was very much like the present but just with fewer gadgets. This picture of the past turns out not to be the case.
Clothing encompasses a lot, a lot, of innovation and technology. The simplest clothes were rectangles taken straight off the loom and stitched and cut as little as possible, They were handed down through the family for decades, because they were extremely costly in work-hours and money to make. Yet they still constituted signals of wealth or poverty however low the average clothing was in terms of complexity, quality, colour and status.
I suggest the real kicker is fashion. Fashion happened in Western Europe but nowhere else in the world. People in, say, Japan, wore exactly the same cut of clothes for a thousand years.
We are all used to looking at Old Masters, great paintings of the Italian Renaissance. And looking at the rich, colourful robes the middle-aged or the old men wore, and the ballet tights that the young men wore. But it seldom occurs to us that what we are looking at is the top one percent of society.
95% pf people lived out in the country on farms all across Europe, They wore whatever the wife could rustle up, The urban poor wore work-clothes that looked like the tunics of Ancient Rome more than a thousand years before. Those ballet tights the rich young men had on were the equivalent of today's cap-turned-backwards to show you are ready for a fight. The tights indicated that you were ready to climb into plate armour, mount a horse and go into battle. Of course the likelihood was you wouldn't - it was just the fashion of the time. But if you are really going to imitate these conjoined hose that I have called tights you have to understand that they are not of a piece but jigsawed together to fit a single individual.
Not only that, but they were worn for about a year then sold. These guys treated clothes the same way we treat automobiles - you resell to part fund another one. And so it went. There was a guild organisation in 15th century Florence especially for second-hand clothes sellers. Obviously everybody could easily tell if you were wearing second-hand clothes,
Someone on the forums mentioned that a movie scene without extras is not a movie scene. People are astonishingly good at noticing little signals from the look and feel of a scene, The clothes and body language, I suggest, are a large part of what makes a viewer get drawn in and decide to keep watching. When I look at the movie scenes and the career clothing on the Content Store I can tell that they are dated. There are plenty of people around who are much more observant than I am and they could probably tell you what continent and what year you are looking at.
So no. Dressing people does not have some pretty standardized conventions (neck.torso, arms and legs... done!) ;-) or no ;-)
Regards
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