The Four Dragons: Designing Digital Fashion With Maxon One How Stephy Fung fused contemporary streetwear and traditional Chinese clothing in a digital fashion collection inspired by Chinese myth.

Stephy Fung is a UK-based 3D digital fashion artist specializing in digital wearables and phygital (physical x digital) fashion. The Four Dragons is her latest NFT collection to drop on SYKY.

Created using Daz3D, CLO3D, Substance Painter, Cinema 4D, ZBrush, and Redshift, the collection is a creative expression of Fung’s British Chinese identity, her cultural heritage, and future-facing vision for digital fashion as the ultimate form of self-expression. 

Fung’s creative journey began with a Bachelor of Arts in graphic design before the storytelling potential of 3D motion design led her to Cinema 4D. After joining Digi.Gxl, a female-led, inclusive collective, she began focusing on 3D for XR (extended reality). Working on a project for Selfridges to bring a physical collection to life in the digital world proved a turning point in her career. “That’s when I first saw designers working with Marvelous Designer and CLO3D and thought, ‘That’s what I want to do,’” she says. “I had always wanted to make my own clothing but didn’t have the resources or technical dressmaking skills. But I knew I could visualize something very quickly in 3D.”

For Fung, the appeal of digital fashion lies in the freedom of self-expression, and her work brings together the different strands of her identity and creative career. “Digital fashion has become a place where I am comfortable expressing my cultural identity through contemporary fashion design,” she explains. Leaning into strong graphic lines reminiscent of manga and anime, her 3D garments feature traditional Chinese motifs and elements set against animated environments that help tell a story.

Four years on, Fung has established herself in the future-facing digital fashion world and attracts commercial commissions from brands like Lenovo, Dell, Highsnobiety, and Snapchat. A passionate advocate and sought-after speaker, she is also a prolific content creator and educator, with teaching platforms on Patreon and free live streams and tutorials on Twitch and YouTube. 

With its ties to cryptocurrency, NFTs, immersive games, the metaverse, and Web 3.0, digital fashion enables Fung to connect with people who understand this blend of fashion and tech. “The magic of digital is that I can create whatever I want without limits. That becomes interesting in immersive environments like the metaverse and game worlds, where people express themselves through digital avatars that can wear any outfit they want with ease and also outfits that exceed what is possible in the real world.” Embracing extended reality (XR), Fung extends the reach of her NFT collectibles with exclusive immersive and physical redeemables.

The Four Dragons project showcases Fung’s creative approach and cross-platform vision. Inspired by the 2024 Chinese Year of the Dragon, she based her collection on the Four Dragons folk tale.

Fung quickly visualized a coherent concept in Procreate, in which the four garments draw on the color and details of the mythic dragons. She began her design process by creating the avatars and garments using Daz3D and CLO3D, texturing them in Substance Painter, and creating the face masks in ZBrush. 

Fung emphasizes the role of environment and lighting to support each piece with story and atmosphere. “I used Cinema 4D for scene building and to bring all the elements together. Lighting is very important, and I art-directed area lights and dome lights in Redshift to highlight the edges of the outfit and create a dreamy atmosphere.”

Traditional Chinese illustration inspired the landscape, the soft mountains and the swirly clouds. “I designed the mountains in the background as vectors in Illustrator. Bringing them into Cinema 4D, I used a volume builder to make them less rigid and more melted into each other, she says. “The clouds were also drawn in Illustrator for iPad and then extruded in Cinema 4D using a volume builder to merge the swirls for a smoother look.” A previously designed water alembic and mist, a VDB from Ross Mason’s cloud pack, completed the atmospheric environment. Finally, the color palette for each scene represented the different rivers, setting the stage for each dragon outfit.

Fung had to consider the challenges of bringing these digital outfits into different worlds. “My garments have organic shapes, making them polygon-heavy, so part of the planning for XR was optimizing them to work within digital worlds,” she explains. Only the Yellow Dragon was designed as a phygital and required more work in collaboration with Phygital Twin, a company that transforms digital designs into physical garments using agile micro-factories. “Because digital fashion doesn’t need to be as functional or practical as a physical garment, a digital garment might need to be modified before it works as a physical piece,” she says. In this case, a pattern cutter helped re-draft the digital patterns into ones that can be manufactured in real life.

As digital fashion moves from the tech niche to mainstream events, Fung’s brand stands out. Her digital collections have been showcased at Metaverse Fashion Week 2023, and her first phygital design was featured at the SYKY x BFC: Worlds Collide event at London Fashion Week 2023. More recently, she was named in Forbes 30 Under 30 Europe 2024, giving her voice, style and digital fashion expertise a broader platform.

Looking to the future, Fung is excited by the potential of Web 3.0 to allow her garments to flow between platforms without restriction. “I would love my digital fashion designs to be easily redeemable in any immersive space or game or as a physical piece. You can wear my design no matter how or where you want to express yourself. That is my end goal.”