Now we're going to cut bits off the mesh to get the style of dress we want.
The QuickDress is deliberately designed to cover up Vicki, with a long skirt,
long sleeves and a high neck, on the principle that it's easier to cut away
the bits you don't need than it is to add extra bits.
If a long skirt, long sleeves and a high neck happens to be what you want, you
can go straight to the next step. The QuickDress can be used as it is in the
cloth room; but for the purposes of illustration I'll make a quick and easy
summer dress. It won't be terribly stylish, but it will give you the basic
inpiration to do better yourself, I hope. :)
A slight aside at this point, if I may. If your skills are in texturing
rather than modelling, you may have thought about cutting the dress by using
transparency maps, rather than modifying the mesh. By all means go ahead and
try it, but my experience suggests that the results won't be too good if you
intend to use the cloth room. This is because the entire mesh will be used
during the simulation, not just the visible bits; that means that creases,
folds and the general "hang" of the fabric will be wrong.
I'll describe the use of Anim8or as the
modeller in the rest of this section, which is for the benefit of those who
haven't tried modelling before. If you already have a favourite modeller,
I'll assume you know how to use it, and can translate what I suggest here.
Apologies to Mac users here, because Anim8or is a Windows program. If there
are any free modellers for the Macintosh, I'm open to recommendations that
I can pass on.
When you open Anim8or, wait a few seconds, and it will default to Object
mode, which is what we want to use. If you're impatient, select Mode >
Object to get there straight away.
Now go to Object > Import... and select Wavefront (*.obj) in the file types
list. Navigate to the mesh you exported from Poser. If you didn't do any
shaping in Poser, go to
Poser\Runtime\Geometries\Morphography\V3QuickDress.obj to get the original
un-modified mesh.
You will see nothing at this point... Or maybe a tiny speck in the centre
of your screen if you look closely. That's because Poser's native scale is
tiny compared to every other 3D program on the planet. Go to view mode
(click on the "eyeball" button), then select "frame
view" (click on the button that looks like a brick surrounded by a
dotted line) to enlarge whatever you have to fit the workspace.
You should now see your shaped mesh something like this, depending on what
view mode you're in. This is flat shaded mode, selected only because it's
clearer.
To get some idea of what the buttons do, go to Options > Tool Tips. Then,
whenever you hover the cursor over a button, its description will be shown
in the bottom left of the Anim8or window (not in a little yellow pop-up box
as it is with many other programs)
Now go to Object/Edit mode to get down and dirty with those unwanted
vertices. :)
To select vertices to remove, click on the Point Select button, and on Drag
Select (shown right). This will enable you to drag your mouse over the
vertices you want to select them.
To add vertices to the selection, hold down the right mouse button while
dragging.
To remove vertices from the selection, hold down the centre mouse button (or
press the scroll wheel) while dragging. If you have no centre button, hold
the Alt key while dragging with the right mouse button.
You can also select individual vertices if you use the Select arrow
(highlighted in blue). As before, click with the right button to add
vertices, and with the centre button or Alt-right to remove them.
You may want to select alternative views: to do this, click on the camera
name in the top left corner of the workspace, and select the one you want.
The first time you go to a new camera, you'll have to go back to Viewpoint
mode (the eyeball button) to expand your view. Be careful when selecting
cameras; if you accidentally click on the workspace window, and miss the
camera name, it will undo all your selections so far. Oops.
If you squint a bit, you can see that I've selected a portion of the skirt
here. Pressing Delete will remove it, to make a shorter dress.
Here, I've already removed most of the sleeves and the neck, and I'm in the
process of removing more mesh to make a new neckline.
A very handy tool is the "Add Edge" tool (highlighted in the
inset). Because removing rectangular facets from the mesh leaves the edges
looking jagged, I'm adding edges to make triangular faces and smooth them off.
Just a quick postscript here, until I can make new screenshots...
Rather than removing entire facets and rebuilding them, I now prefer to use
Anim8or's "cut" tool (the one with a picture of what looks like a
cleaver on it - careful, you could have someone's eye out with that).
Before putting it to work, deselect the back-facing facets (click on the
"Back" button) so that you don't cut the back of the dress.
One advantage that it has is that it preserves the UV mapping, so if
you're really careful you may not even need to re-map.
Now the edges are added, they have to be filled in to make actual polygons.
Using edge select mode (see the highlights in the inset), select all the
edges you just added. It doesn't matter if you select more than required.
Then from the Edit menu, select Fill Holes (or on later versions of
Anim8or, just use the hotkey J). The results can be seen on the right: new
triangular polygons are added, and they'll be coloured yellow to begin
with. Yellow polygons are facing you, dark blue ones are facing the opposite
direction.
Once the mesh is finished to your satisfaction, export it from Anim8or
(Object > Export...) - make sure to select Wavefront format for your
export.
Now you can import your new dress into Poser to see how it looks. Set up
a mannequin by zeroing a Victoria 3 figure as before, then import the dress
mesh. When you do this, uncheck all the boxes in the import dialogue. You
should see it displayed as here; Poser will make up a random colour for it,
because it's like that.
Yes, I know it isn't very stylish, and Vicki will probably slap my face
once I close this tutorial; but it's just an illustration, ok? You and I
can both do better than this. Well, you can, anyway. :)