Opinion
Clothing designers often use vector software like Illustrator from Adobe, because it is easy to get started with. The drawback to Illustrator is when it comes to modify the design, or even to adapt the design to multiple sizes of person. This is where software specific to clothing design comes into play, and I got to try one out.
One of my relatives received her diploma in dress design, even winning the top technical award at the year-end fashion show. It's been a few years, and now she is getting back into it. She tried one program, which even does 3D draping, but it was too expensive for her, as it asks customers to pay for the software over and over again, every year (aka "subscription").
Free Clothing Designer
Eventually she tracked down Seamly, and asked me to help her a bit getting into it, given my CAD background. Seamly is free dress design software that looks a lot like a typical 2D CAD package (see image below). That would be your first mistake.
Seamly dress design software, as it first starts up
It certainly was mine. I began drawing with it, like I would with a BricsCAD or an ARES Commander, but it wasn't working right for me. Puzzled, I asked my relative, who explained that I was doing it all wrong.
It turns out that Seamly is parametric CAD. And whereas in CAD we normally draw some lines, then use parametrics to make geometric connections between them, in clothing design you do the opposite:
Step 1. Start with the SeamlyMe software, in which you enter parametric values, which are the sizes of the various parts of the human body, such as inseam, bust, and waist. Many sizes are provided; here is what it looks like to enter body size parameters into SeamlyMe:
Entering body size parameters into SeamlyMe
Step 2. Send the parameters to the Seamly CAD-like software, which then generates a vector image that can be edited. Here is the blouse my relative was designing as a tutorial in learning the software:
Seamly displaying the design as a series of parametric values
CAD users will recognize the alphanumerics as parametric variable names, such as A18G and AFWaist. (G is short for guide, which in Seamly is like a construction line in CAD.)
Entering the World of 3D
Now, 2D is important to clothing design, because that's the way the material is cut -- think sheetmetal design, but with nearly all pieces curved. See figure below. All kinds of adjustments have to be made to the flat clothing design so that when the shirt or pants are put on, they curve around the human body in a pleasing manner.
Onshape CAD software designing a curved sheetmetal cone as a flat pattern
So, one of the big things in clothing design is draping: how will the material look on a variety of bodies. This is a very tough 3D problem to solve, as programmers have to deal with the vagaries of how gravity and body parts affect the look of the material, and the characteristics of the material itself. That expensive competitor to Seamly offers draping; Seamly does not.
But Seamly does work with third-party firms that offer add-ons to input of 3D data to the pattern design. These are not free. 3DLook, for example, has Mobile Scanning software to generate 100 body measurements from two photos, front and side; see figure below.
Smartphone being used to generate body measurements with 3Dlook
There are other add-ons, but their Web sites are in French-only, and I didn't take the time to translate them.
Back to the Printing Problem
The most complex aspect of regular CAD is the printing problem. There are three ways to print a drawing:
- With the design fitted to the paper, good for check prints
- With the design scaled to the paper, so that measurements can be taken from it
- With all the bells and whistles added on, like how line end are treated and substituting grayscales for colors
Pattern making is similar but different. You've still get the fit-the-design-to-the-paper for check prints. But patterns are never scaled; they are only ever printed at 100%. When your printer is a typical A-size laser printer, that means lots of sheets of paper that need to be fitted together by manually cutting and taping. Fortunately, programs like Seamly know that, and so automatically add things like overlaps and cutlines the printout. See figure below.
Two overlapping pages from a 21-page pattern PDF
Here is an example for two sheets of a 21-page printout. These are generated in a PDF file, and in Acrobat you need to make sure you print the file at 100% (or with None scaling), without two-sided printing. Here is a closeup of the cutting and overlapping instructions, included with the printout:
Cutting, grid placement, page number, and overlaps
Clearly, this would work better by having a larger printer!
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