Morph Man for the Bakermat Virtual Textile Library

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I was approached by Quinten Schaap from Bakermat, to create an artwork for the launch of their Virtual Library.

Bakermat is a luxury textile and haberdashery shop located in Antwerp. From the very start their vision included a digital double library of their textiles. On the 15th of February they launched their first collection of textiles in their Virtual Library. 

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The world of Fabrics

A bit of background information for our non-European readers: Antwerp is a European fashion-capital. The city is especially known for the Royal Academy of Fine Arts and their prestigious Fashion Department.

Also, it was the home turf of legendary fashion collective The Antwerp Six.

All that just to say: Antwerp has always been on the forefront of fashion innovation. It’s very inspiring to see upcoming Belgium creative businesses innovate and push boundaries again. 

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Ideation Workflow 

To showcase the Bakermat textures' full potential, I knew I really wanted to use the Morph-Man full-body mesh, to create a graphic and impactful image.  

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At first, I had this whole idea in my head, with multiple Morph-Man characters in frame. I was very excited with the variety of materials in the Bakermat library, and wanted to showcase the variety of textiles. 

I shopped 8 Bakermat materials in total, created 8 Morph-Man designs and sketched a rough thumbnail with my idea. 

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Though these designs are very cute, I was a bit too ambitious here. The tight deadline forced me to quickly pivot. I decided to focus on one material, to let its quality shine. 

Inspired by designs such as Leigh Bowery’s drag, I chose the Morph-Man design with spikes. Reminding me of an abstract sun, I imagined a backdrop with clouds, to create a “sunny” concept.

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The Workflow

I started by posing a character inside Blender.

I really like to use the Blender Human Generator Add-on. These meshes come with a very solid rig, which allowed me to pose the hands exactly how I wanted. Hands are very expressive, so solid hand-posing will give the final render a lot of life. 

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I jumped into Marvelous Designer and opened the Morph-Man T-pose file. I made sure that my Human Generator character had the same T-pose as Morph-Man, to save time when simulating the cloth. 

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Obviously I added the head spikes and the star on the face.

With skintight meshes, Marvelous Designer does have some collision issues. A mixture of mesh density and collision thickness usually fixes this. The areas that still didn’t look good, I fixed in Zbrush.

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For “Sun-head Morph-Man” I decided to use this yellow checkered wool twill. The material has a pretty rough weave, which I knew would translate well and create a lot of detail.

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I did go into Substance Painter so that I could control the exact position of the checkered material. I added a few layered roughness maps to add a bit of detail, but other than that, I didn’t touch the material too much. 

For rendering, we actually did a pass in Cinema 4D Physical Renderer. Later, we transferred the scene into Chaos Corona, because at the end of the day it just gives a much more realistic light quality. 

But it’s very fun to see the two side by side!

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The background is from The Complete Clouds Pack. It’s one of the Tropical Clouds with a posterize effect applied in Photoshop. 

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The final Morph-Man X Bakermat render turned out like this: 

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Conclusion

Thank you so much to the team at Bakermat for reaching out to me. Don’t forget to check out their Instagram! They asked a couple of artists to use their materials, and the results are absolutely stunning

So happy to have been a part of this campaign! 

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