CYBERPUNK EVENING DRESS
My take on creating a dress in the style of Cyberpunk 2077. For those familiar with the game, the design philosophy was based on the concept of an Arasaka corpo evening dress. The project was entirely inspired by the in-game outfits.
~ BREAKDOWN SECTION ~
A bit of backstory — last year I made a dress to understand the basics of working in Marvelous Designer. I had a single photo as a reference and used it to practice building clothing patterns based on an image. The result is on the picture below.
The project was completed, and the necessary skills were acquired. However, even then I was concerned about the process of optimizing the geometry of this dress for texturing (as well as the texturing itself) and the subsequent use of the garment in simulation for animation.
I remember back then I imported that dress into Substance Painter (default Marvelous triangulated geo), tried to come up with some kind of design, but I couldn’t made anything better than floral patterns. Unsatisfied with the result, the project was closed and abandoned for a long time.
About six months later, I saw some clothing designs in Cyberpunk and finally realized what was missing in the initial design. I dug up the project and started reworking it, setting the goal to treat it as a real in-game asset.
A basic concept formed in my mind — I already knew the elements I wanted to include: transparent parts, emissive materials, soft lines without sharp angles, asymmetry (optional), and overall cyberpunk vibes.
The first step was reworking the pattern: the central part (the corset) became transparent, with a smooth transition to the back, and sharp angles were softened.
Dress simulation
Next step was exporting to ZBrush to add thickness. For this, the topology in Marvelous Designer was converted to quads and a basic UV map was generated. In ZBrush, the UV islands were converted into polygroups, and thickness was added. As a result, I ended up with both a low-poly and a high-poly version of a thick dress with UVs based on polygroups.
Then I imported everything into Blender to fix the topology of the bottom part and create a new UV layout that takes the previously added thickness into account. As a result of the retopology, around 5k polygons were removed.
The model was unwrapped using overlapping groups. The groups were distributed as follows: shoulders (outer part), shoulders (inner part), bottom (inner + outer), and several groups for the edges.
Next comes the texturing. Briefly, the main tools used: the emissive channel for the glowing lines, normal maps for the folds on the transparent part, and the path tool for outlining details with a metallic line.
The whole process took 4 days. The first day was spent reworking the pattern, optimizing the topology for ZBrush, and doing a test texturing pass. The remaining 3 days were dedicated to refining the design. Below is a design evolution.
Here you can see the model and textured details up close
