snippedHazard

[flashback to the space program prep phases]

Rocky: [wholly focused on building the ship itself and does not care where the astrophage to power it comes from]

Eridian!Francois Leclerc: [having a total emotional breakdown because breeding however many million kilograms of astrophage in the oceans is an extinction level event for marine environments with massive and unpredictable effects on the ecosystems of Erid but it's also undeniably the fastest way to get enough of it to power a spaceship]

and while everyone else is flipping the heck out about sapient aliens

>I don't see the point in living anymore

🐖EMPATHYPIG REPLIED TO YOUR POST 💬

i can't figure out what this prouvé dress image comes from--for all I know it IS some AI retouching thing--but it could 100% be uncredited work from an academic digital reconstruction project.

as a dress historian and someone who does, to certain extents, reproduce historic dress, i have NEVER seen a digital reconstruction project (as of 2026) that I think actually advances knowledge or supports public understanding. the technology simply isn't there--and it's paired with a lack of serious sewing/textiles knowledge, specifically of the historical variety, in its technicians (ex. for Clo3D).

This has become more common in recent years with digital projects meant to resuscitate unwearable historic clothing and show it in movement, etc. Common arguments in support:

We can't get that fabric anymore to make a physical reconstruction

Digital work is much faster than physical, especially mockup/pattern/fit tests

Virtual products can be disseminated to a global audience

Ex. Empress Shōken's evening ensemble;

and the Refashioning the Renaissance doublet project that the School of Historical Dress--who are excellent when it comes to physical reconstructions--advised on:

Etc.

So! You know what can also be disseminated digitally to a global audience? Photographs and videos of physical reconstructions! (Ex. the entire BBC A Stitch in Time series.)

You know what does not behave or look like actual fabric? Digital fabric! Ever.

You know something really crucial to many items of historic clothing that separates it from modern clothing? It is often meant to shape the body--meaning that 'draping' or 'fitting' it digitally to a natural-body-shaped avatar (or, as I have seen, one with a modern bra/shapewear silhouette) is pointless.

Check out the difference between the physical and digital reconstructions of the RtR project:

There are worse and more recent examples to point to as well, but I'm not feeling mean enough to drag them out right now.

In addition to physical reconstruction, you know what a really good and more reliable method of showing, say, the hidden guts of a garment is? Illustration. Really good, loving line drawings of the type that Janet Arnold and Nancy Bradfield specialized in.

Patterns of Fashion 2 (1972) / Costume in Detail (1968)

I'm not saying that physical reconstruction and traditional illustration methods are perfect. But in my relatively well-informed opinion, digital reconstruction is nowhere near the point where it is actually useful in any capacity and I would appreciate if people stopped acting like it is.

The technology and its attending parts (pre-loaded fabrics, textures, avatar bodies, etc) are designed for modern clothing, and imo they aren't even very good at representing that realistically. They absolutely cannot be ported over and used for historic clothing. This has been discussed in the field; the last conference I went to had a whole panel on the topic. But people keep trying anyway, and they continue to argue for the method's utility.

If you actually care about furthering knowledge and public understanding, put the digital tools down and funnel that money towards physical reconstruction and actual, experiential understanding of material, fit, and result. Having to rely on a worse-quality linen IRL does not actually screw up the overall effect to a serious degree, even though it might change the making experience as well as wear patterns and strength of the ensemble. Using modern linens still provides useful information to researchers ("If this fabric doesn't do the right thing, what would the historical version have needed to look/act like in order to accomplish that?") and certainly gives a better and more realistic visual experience for audiences.

Now, there are a couple things that are very 100% correct about this critique:

The reconstructions shown suck ass

There is minimal ability to recreate historical fabrics in Clo (will touch on this later)

It is nearly impossible to recreate the fine details of construction in the program itself, I had to use external programs and a lot of trickery to mimic real construction techniques

Using the default models for draping rather than custom-making a historically accurate sillhouette is a great way to make a bad reconstruction (just like with real ones!)

However, I would argue that these examples shown are just... missing the point of Clo/Marvelous. The dress appears to be a render of the model using Clo, and I guess it's fun to see the work in progress but that doublet is way too low poly to take advantage of the physics engine.

The purpose of Clo3D is to make sewing patterns. It models fabric relatively realistically and can preview what a garment might look like. The renders are just that, a preview. They might be used by a designer to show their concepts or to pitch a pattern, but they aren't the intended output of the program. MD is a little different, since it is intended for use in games and animation, it's a jumping off point for creating realistic-looking clothing for digital characters, as opposed to modelling it all by hand.

All of that is to say, these tools are made to be tools, not a final product. In the example I gave above, I did detailed research into the original sources, miniature (physical) reconstructions to get a feel for the layering and stitching, created a custom model with the proportions and shape I wanted the corset waist to have, and then after modelling and posing the basic garment I moved it to a digital sculpting program to add fine details. Even then, it doesn't look as realistic as the physical reconstructions I based it on! At the end of the day, it's a digital sculpture and the best it can be is as good as the time spent and the references used.

Clo could absolutely be useful in certain historical reproduction contexts! For example, it can (in skilled hands) be used to turn a single real historical pattern into a range of sizes to make printable patterns. If one were to scan themselves wearing appropriate undergarments and turn that into a rigged model, it would be possible to fully pattern a historical reconstruction piece in Clo and reduce the time needed in making mockups and fitting.

There are some nitpicks I have as well, really catty 3D modeller nitpicks. The constant use of the default model, ew. The polycounts they're using for simulation are very low, which is why the fabric doesn't look realistic. Trying to recreate such a heavily embroidered garment in Clo is silly, Clo can't do that. At least they used multiple layers, but I don't know if I would agree on their material properties.

Speaking of material properties! This is what I talked about earlier with fabrics. Believe it or not, Clo is capable (if you have insane processing power) of recreating the behaviour of fabrics shockingly well. The low polycounts shown in those videos are used to make it easier on the computer while draping, but ideally you'd ratchet up the polycount to a million and use the Crazy Realism Mode on the simulator before export and it can recreate fabric folds gorgeously. And specifically, it can exactly recreate the material properties of real fabrics.

If you browse the Clo-set store (yes that's what the store is called), you can find hundreds of fabric companies posting samples of their fabrics, and those are all real, accurate recreations of those fabrics! Companies use specialized machines to record different physical properties, and then those can be plugged into the program's physics engine. All of this is used by real companies to make real clothing- I can guarantee if you own any mass-market clothes made in the last 5 years (which, to be clear, you probably shouldn't) they were probably patterned in Clo3D.

I'm afraid to say the corset sculpture does nothing for me as a visual (texture aside, it still appears that the corset is molding to the avatar body, for example, by the way it's lit, which gives an incorrect impression of the fabric and the garment's purpose)--I hope you won't be too dismayed by that, having read my original post--but given that you've stated the purpose was to follow draft within the program and that it succeeded, clearly that wasn't the goal in the first place. I'm glad you were able to accomplish your goal, though I am curious what the purpose of being able to follow said instructions digitally is? (genuine question) Since you've stated you also made a physical reconstruction, if in miniature, it's clear you had other goals with the digital version. Also, what drafting instructions are you following? I'm not familiar with any from the period for corsetry and I would love to know.

If I recall properly, in the panel I heard I'm pretty sure panelists admitted that Clo3D and similar programs are obviously not designed for the work they wanted to do and that they were simply making do with what they had on hand in pursuit of their goal. Hearing your commentary and experience just reinforces my question of "why is this so important to do anyway"?

Patterning, especially in size ranges, is unfortunately not a common goal of this kind of work or in the field generally, which sucks because that would indeed be a fab use of this technology that would enable more diverse reconstruction projects!!

I'd be really interested to hear your fuller thoughts on the RtR project work--the paper on it is available open access here, if you haven't read it. This is an example of doing more than just using the single dressed visual, of course, but it still was done with the goal of providing a visual (in this case, a video of the layers and construction), and I was baffled to read that they had to screw with the layers etc. as they went in order to get the final video to work at all. I suppose it's useful as a WIP publication for how one can use the tech??

ehasz then went out to put out 'the dragon prince' for netflix which was not a show i was crazy about but i think i feel pretty confident in calling it better than legend of korra.

now what's also notable about this situation is that ehazs is a notorious enough misogynist to have a section of his wikipedia page devoted to his alleged professional mistreatment of women

elizabeth on the other hand has absolutely no presence online whatsoever. ATLA is her only writing credit. She wrote eight episodes of the show including Zuko Alone, The Avatar and the Fire Lord, and The Southern Raiders. She and aaron are now also divorced.

Now, if you know anything about how misogynist male creatives working in the same field as their wives operate, then you can probably reach the same conclusion I have. If a man is willing to treat female coworkers like his nanny and assistant as a baseline, imagine what he feels entitled to expect from a female coworker that is also his wife. I would not be surprised if much of the work on ATLA that ehasz was able to build his career off of would not have been nearly as good without a lot of behind the scenes assistance from elizabeth.

i didn't expect this post to get any traction and be seen by anyone other than my immediate followers who already know how i feel about this sort of stuff, so i didn't really Explain my point here. but i'm not arguing that bryke are responsible for mishandling the ATLA IP at all, i'm making the case that an IP-based system just does not facilitate good artmaking in general.

like it's not that i think elizabeth welch is The One True Genius Mind Behind Avatar and is the person who actually deserves the real credit/the one who could have Made The Franchise Good if they'd let her. but what i am trying to point out by bringing her up is that there are so many unsung people working on these sorts of projects who are critical to their execution (notably what ideas live and die by) but who don't get factored in to either the legal understanding of who has the right to produce More of it, or our cultural ideas about who gets to claim authority over a work.

like if you remember when the new netflix show was announced the whole big thing among the fanbase was Bryke Are Gonna Be In This One So It Could Be Good For Real! obviously they ended up leaving the project so we will never know if their version of that would have been good or not (i suspect not, personally) but. point being is there's a common conception that because bryke hold the status of Creator over this work, they have the capacity to imbue continued ventures in this IP space with legitimacy and quality in a way other people don't. and i feel like that's just been proven to be untrue based on how underwhelming and dissonant korra felt.

in a world where we had no real legal structures in place or deeply entrenched social ideas about who has Ownership over a fictional setting and it's characters, anyone would have the liberty to produce related works in a more legitimized context than fanfiction and contribute to a greater and richer collective body. we'd have the luxury of picking and choosing whose interpretations of these ideas and themes we like, as we currently do for public domain works and those based in fairytales/myth.

twitter= terrible website in turmoil that exists regardless

snapchat= save nothing and prosper. cant have any trace

linkedin= lets ideate nothing kind. even death is nicer

instagram= idealized natural self thats a good raise above mediocre

tiktok= teens idolizing killing their own knowledge

reddit= rallying every dork doing insipid things

quora= quite useless or redundant answers

google= get online! only getting less effective

letterboxd= letting every tryhard thrust every review before others XD

They're smart fuckin birds, I believe in them

They're smart fuckin birds, I believe in them