The right FIT

How the costumes for ADAM’S characters came to life

Once the project was greenlit, Oats Studios’ costume designer Kristin Thurber quickly got to work on creating costumes with dystopianinspired, recycled materials. While they didn’t have a full cast yet – meaning they didn’t have exact measurements – the team were able to digitally edit the costumes later on in the process. To ensure the digital clothes moved in a realistic manner and were given as much textural detail as possible, the physical costumes were taken to the studio’s photogrammetry room, to be photographed in high resolution. As well as these 3D scans, a rig was built to take multiple single shots of the thread-weave from 12”-square [30cm] swatches, to give Oats Studios’ digital tailor, Sean Frandsen, 4K resolution close-ups of the fabric.

After working in Photoshop and Adobe Lightroom, these 4K resolution swatches were transported into Marvelous Designer, with Frandsen working with Thurber’s traditional sewing patterns to digitally stitch together the fabric. Harvey praises Unity’s Alembic Importer and its ability to cache large geometry datasets, allowing Frandsen to work in Marvelous Designer yet also being able to port his work into the game engine.

While this worked for most of the clothes, it was more difficult when it came to the character Marion, due to the multi-layered nature of her costume. It meant there would be too much data to push through from Marvelous, so Frandsen transported some pieces into Zbrush and did a sculpted pass for stitches and other seam-level details to export as the normal maps. This attention to detail allowed the costumes on ADAM to have an authenticity that may not have been achieved had they been built in a purely virtual way.