Morphography tutorials
A Guide to Using the QuickDress - Part 4
• Main Index • Tutorial Index • Introduction • Initial Shaping • Cutting the Cloth • What to do Next •

• How many polygons?

The QuickDress is built with quite large polygons - that's one of the things that makes it quick. This will mean that you will lose some resolution in the cloth room, because the coarse polygon size won't give the simulation much to work with. You may want to subdivide the faces. Anim8or can do this, and so can later versions of UV Mapper Professional if you have that. This will result in smoother folds and creases, but the cloth simulation will take longer to calculate.

If you follow the cloth room tutorial, linked below, the illustrations given there use an un-subdivided mesh; so you can see it will work, but maybe not as well as it could. It's up to you.

• UV Mapping

If you've done anything more than the most basic operations on the mesh, then a new UV map will be necessary. The QuickDress has a simple mapping applied, but any polygons that you added with Anim8or won't have UV coordinates and hence won't accept textures; that will look very strange, to say the least.

Fortunately, UV mapping is now a whole lot easier than it used to be. Just have a look at my UV mapping tutorial. You can get everything you need for free, and you may end up actually enjoying UV mapping. Or maybe it's just me. :)

• A Choice of Routes

As I mentioned in the introduction, you have a choice now. You can go to the cloth room and make dynamic clothing out of your new mesh; this is the recommended route, assuming you have Poser 5 or higher. It's realistic, and you don't need to delve into the technicalities of the set-up room, CR2s and what have you.

Not tried the cloth room before? See Morphography's Bare Bones Cloth Room Tutorial - it's not as difficult as you may have thought, and when you see the results, you won't look back.

On the other hand, if you're making clothing for use in Poser 4, or maybe Pro Pack, it will have to be conforming. Pro Pack owners can use the set-up room, but I know nothing about that, sorry. If you're happy with the nuts and bolts of Poser, then jump into the Introduction to Modelling Tutorial - if you want, start at step 6, UV Mapping and More and take it from there.

• Main Index • Tutorial Index • Introduction • Initial Shaping • Cutting the Cloth • What to do Next •