Morphography tutorials

An Introduction to Conforming Clothing

• Index • Introduction • Some Basics • Another Fine Mesh • All the Trimmings • Feel the Width • UV Mapping and More • Pose-Ability • Final Fitting •

You can download a PDF version of this tutorial here to print out or read off-line. Thanks to Heidi for the conversion. You'll need Acrobat Reader to view this.

"How do I make clothes for Poser?"

That question is asked a lot by newcomers to the world of Poser. The program itself is so easy to use, it is not difficult to imagine that there must be a simple method for generating add-ons to it. No matter how many downloadable goodies there may be, there comes a time when the exact garment you are looking for does not exist. How nice it would be if you could install the Acme Clothing Generator, click on a few options and have your every wish fulfilled. Unfortunately, it isn't so.

But let's not be negative. You will need some determination, and some skill in visualising 3D objects; and you won't become a virtual haute couturier overnight. But you can create your own clothing.

Up until Poser 5, which introduced dynamic clothing and the Cloth Room, Poser clothing was almost always in the form of a conforming figure - that's why it lives in the Figures library palette. It's built in the same way as a posable character, but designed to match the joints of the unclothed figure that it is meant to fit. Every conforming figure comes in two main parts.

• A 3D mesh in Wavefront OBJ format. This is modelled to fit the OBJ mesh for the base figure, and has the same groups (body parts).
• A CR2 file which tells Poser how to deform the mesh when it is posed or comformed. This also has information on material specifications, and any morph targets.

Maybe you don't have a 3D modeller, and maybe you don't have the foggiest notion about what goes on inside a CR2 file. Never mind - we can fix you up.

You can get some results without even having a 3D modeller of any sort - try my Modelling Props Page. You can do a limited amount of modelling within Poser itself using nothing more than these props with Poser's grouping tool and magnets. But since Anim8or is free, there's no real reason not to have a basic modeller at hand.

Nor do you need to know much or anything about CR2s. There are utilities available that will do the hard work for you; and if you like hard work, you can usually "borrow" a CR2 from another similar clothing item and hack it with a text editor. Not exactly hard after all.

Next

Feeling better? Let's move on to part 2 and deal with some of the basics.

• Index • Introduction • Some Basics • Another Fine Mesh • All the Trimmings • Feel the Width • UV Mapping and More • Pose-Ability • Final Fitting •