Most people will probably tell you to start with Blender, but honestly, that program is a beast — it’s super powerful but can totally overwhelm you at the start. Before you make anything cool in Blender, it’ll take a lot of time, and that can feel pretty discouraging. That’s why I’d suggest you start with something more fun and beginner-friendly.

For making clothes, the best program is "Marvelous Designer". The tutorials are easy because it’s designed more for fashion designers, not computer geeks. The downside? It’s paid software (but honestly, it’s worth the money — it’s really good). If you’re low on cash, you can try "Style3D Studio". It’s an alternative to Marvelous Designer, and after the trial ends, it switches to a free mode on its own. From what I know, the free version still gives you plenty of tools to make decent clothes.

That’s just the starting point. You should know that usually you’ll be using several programs in your workflow. Here’s how it usually goes:

You start in Marvelous Designer (or Style3D) and design the clothing.

Then, you export the clothes into a 3D program like Blender.
Why? Because games need simpler geometry to run smoothly in real time. For example, a nicely detailed shirt from Marvelous Designer, with all its folds and stitches, might have 1 million triangles. But for a game, you’ll probably need to reduce that to something like 5,000 triangles. (FYI, triangles are like the 3D version of pixels — they’re what your graphics card uses to build the shape.)

So, you need to do something called "retopology" - basically, you rebuild a simpler version of the clothing over the detailed one. After that, you unwrap the UVs - this means you lay out the 3D surface flat so you can apply textures (like fabric patterns) properly.

Now, here’s the tricky part: when you go from 1 million triangles down to 5,000, you lose a lot of fine details (like small folds, wrinkles, stitches). To make the low-poly model still look detailed, you use something called a "normal map" - it’s a purple texture that fakes the look of bumps and dents on the surface, even though they’re not really there.

To create the normal map, you “bake” the detail information from the high-poly model (from Marvelous or Style3D) onto the low-poly one you just retopologized. The normal map works together with the UVs you made earlier.

In the end, you’ll have a low-poly shirt that looks detailed because of the normal map.

Next step: "skinning". This means attaching the low-poly model to the game character’s skeleton. In Blender, you use special tools to paint the areas of the shirt that should follow each bone (like the arm bone, for example). There are shortcuts for this - for instance, you can transfer the skinning from one model (like a base model called Jodi) to your own, especially if your shirt fits tightly to the body.

Once you’ve done that, you have a game-ready low-poly model that moves with the character and looks like the one you designed.
Finally, you export it as an FBX file, import it into Unreal Engine, follow the game devs’ instructions to name the files correctly, put them in the right folders, and pack it all up for the game’s mods folder.

Yeah, the whole process probably sounds overwhelming, and honestly, if you’re starting from scratch, it’s a long journey. That’s why I recommend starting the fun way - with Marvelous Designer (if you can afford it) or Style3D. It’s enjoyable right from the start and gets you used to rotating objects in 3D space. Once you get the hang of that, moving forward will feel much easier. And you can always find tutorials for each stage of the process!

Originally posted by John Doe:

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I'm not Op, but thanks for detailing your process, or a process. I was curious what you use personally. I love your mod btw. I've used blender a lot, but I'm just getting into Substance Painter lately.

So you typically start in Marvelous and go to Blender? What do you texture in?
Just curious since everything you come up with looks quite polished and I'm still getting my feet wet in texturing.

And just to contribute myself, I found out about a clothing program called Jinny that has a lot of features I think you can use for free, at least concerning modding. You can import custom character meshes, stitch, sim, texture and edit with a pretty big preset clothing library. The default characters have cartoon heads and hands, but I think the body proportion is actually normal. I haven't played around in it too much just because the controls feel so different, but it's definitely useful.