Pose-Ability

Morphography tutorials

Pose-Ability

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

We're nearly there now. We have our mesh; it fits the base figure; and it's been grouped into body parts. Now we have to tell Poser how to deform it when the figure it's conformed to bends. There's a hard way, and there's an easy way. Guess which one we're going to take? That's right, the cheat's method. :-)

Something borrowed...

We need to generate a CR2 file for the new clothes, and the easiest way to do that is to borrow a pre-existing one. Here's a checklist to narrow down your search:

It has to be for clothing for the same base figure: Vicki in this case.
It should be for a similar item of clothing.
It must have the same body parts in it, plus at least one extra in each "direction".

In other words, we are looking for a skirt or dress for Vicki; with an abdomen, hip, lThigh and rThigh; and preferably shins and chest as well. This is because although the skirt itself doesn't have shins or a chest, the bending of these parts of Vicki will still have an influence on the shaping of the parts which are there.

As Vicki demonstrates here, when she sits down, the skirt falls properly over her knees instead of sticking straight out. That's due to the influence of those "phantom" body parts - in this case, the shins.

In the end, I chose the CR2 from PoserStyle's free Medieval Dress which meets all the requirements. It's also cut with the adjacent thighs that were discussed on the previous page of this tutorial, so I didn't even have to fix that. PoserStyle has disappeared since I wrote this, but you can still download the dress here thanks to Thip and the folks at the PosetteForever forum. Alternatively, you could take a copy of my CR2.

Making a CR2

This has already been covered in Making a Master CR2, but I'll go over the basic points again.

Make a copy of the CR2 you're "borrowing" first, to make sure you don't inadvertently write over the original.
Use Morph Manager to strip out all the morph channels, and save it.
Open the de-morphed CR2 in a text editor, and clear the materials list as described here.
Edit both of the figureResFile lines to point to the OBJ file you saved from UVmapper - the one with the groups in it. See Pointing to a different OBJ for more detail.

There's one more thing to do for this particular project, which is to allow for those adjacent thigh parts in the grouping. Nearly at the end of the CR2, you'll see the weld section, which looks something like this:


	defaultPick hip:1
 
	displayOn 1
 
	weld    abdomen:1
  
			 hip:1

	weld    rThigh:1
  
			 hip:1

	weld    lThigh:1
  
			 hip:1


	weld    lThigh:1
  
			 rThigh:1


	allowsBending 1

You need to add that extra statement highlighted in red; in the PoserStyle dress CR2, it's already there, but others won't have it. This tells Poser that the lThigh and rThigh parts are joined to each other as well as to the hip part. The number that follows the other body part names should be repeated for your new weld statement; here it's 1, but it might be something else for another CR2.

Save the file, and open up Poser for the moment of truth.

Is it going to work today?

In the Poser library palette, you should see your new piece of clothing, although there won't be a thumbnail of course - just the famous shrugging man. Load it up, and it should appear.

The colours will be all wrong as well, so open up the materials dialogue and set them up; I usually go for plain white with a black highlight, but you might prefer something more cheerful. Now you can save the item back into the menu, which will generate a thumbnail, and you can check the conforming.

Next

Next: Final Fitting

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