I remember sometime ago I saw a tutorial about that using the catsuit cr2 file and a dress with only one part (named hip) can anyone remember where to find it? If I have to make a new mesh for the dress where the hip part should end??? What about the shins??? Can anyone help???

okay...when you make your dress in your modelling program...cut it up to match exactly your poser figure. and name the parts, the same. then when you export, and use an existing cr2, you are ready to roll. so for the hip...and, i know some will disagree with me, here....just copy the outline of the hip, front and back, unless you plan on using a cr2 that has a long hip piece...perhaps, instead of working with the actual poser model, it would be easier to trace the parts outline of the cr2 model you plan on using. using the catsuit is not effective, for 2 reasons...1. you are adding deltas that you really won' need...making your cr2 larger than need be....2. since it is a "pant" type piece of clothing your cr2 will not weld the thighs and shins together...and it will split like a pants article.

If you want the knees to bend, you'll need to add a Knee Bend morph to it, since the hip needs to run all the way down the middle and thus you can't have shins (else they would have to be welded to more than one item, which works in preview mode sometimes, but hoses the render). So what you do is build 'Knee Bend' MTs and if you want to get really fancy, you can add a null body part for each shin (a part with no geometry) that is an ERC master to the knee bend morph.

Hoof. This is getting tough : can you tell me more about null body parts, or suggest a tutorial ? Thanks in advance. Compiler

A null body part is simply a body part that has no corresponding geometry inthe OBJ. I don't know what tuts there are out there, but Bloodsong's Painlessly Easy Conforming Clothing tutorial hits on the topic in a roundabout way, because the techniques he describes don't require you to remove body parts from the base conformer. Basically: You run the hip all the way down the centre. You tun the thighs all the way down the sides and they are parented by the hip. You give the thighs and hip morph targets, something like 'Left Shin Bend', that are the objects at a 90 degree bend (don't try to push for more because a morph makes a vertex go straight to it's target, not in a curve). You put shins in the CR2, but they do not refer to any geometry in the OBJ file. But since they are there, when it comforms they will adopt the pose of their conforming target. You add ERC to slave the morph dials to the shin position, with a deltaAddDelta of 1/90th or -1/90th (can't recall which way the shin bend goes), so that when the lShin is at a 90-degree angle the MT is at 1. This may still cause some breakage along the way, so some manual MTs to spread the skirt and fix things would be good. This will still not work perfectly at >90 bend of the shins, so be sure to not hide the MTs so the user can tweak the dials manually to get the higher bends to look right.

Jim, you are distracting us ! How are we suppose to concentrate now ? Anyway, I wish my professors' assistants had looked like this one... --------------------------------------------------- Can someone expand a bit onto what is ERC ? (or may be suggest a tutorial) Thanks in advance Compiler

ERC is the generic name for what was originally called JCM (Joint Controlled Morphs). JCM is a part of ERC, but you can do more than run morphs off joints, you can run other joints, mutiple joints in different directions if you like. You could (probably) even run joints off Full-Body-Morphs, only I haven't seen this yet. There is a real good tutorial at Nerd's and Rbtwhiz's sites (only I don't have an address), those two guys discovered and named the scheme, incidently. Anyway, a quick word on why long dres are a problem: There is no possable known way to make a skirt with hip, thighs and shins in mesh. Reasons get complicated, so just trust me on this part. Some other answers are: "Shins" run by magnents "Ghost" parts "Mermaid Style" (common things, common shins in mesh) Shins run by morphs (probably the worst answer, morphs are straight line, joints rotate) The "all ghost" solution, with various tricks. Hip mesh only, ghost shins, thighs, whatever. Requires an advanced degree in fudging things. ;-)

"common things" = "common thighs" Gee, I need to proof-read better!

With ERC, you can run any dial of any other dial, and you can even place in-between valueParms in and cascade them. 'There is no possable known way to make a skirt with hip, thighs and shins in mesh. Reasons get complicated, so just trust me on this part' Well, actually, there is. But it would be amazingly complex to make it conform, and it's not something I could easily do (I'm sure I could hack at it and get it eventually). Bloodsong and Anton have both done things to effectively do this. It involves setting up the heirarchy backwards. It's scary.

Well, I bought Anton's, just to see how he does it, the thighs and shins are ghost parts, not in mesh. They are like that on the nightgown I put the pic up of also, only using another system.

OK, now I understand that ERC involves a deep dive into the cr2 (or cr2 Edit may be). But you mentioned the "mermaid solution". Is it possible for a dress which has only 1 thigh and 1 shin to conform to a 2 legged character ? Thanks for taking some of your time to answer my newbies questions. Compiler

Yeop, but you have to pick which leg to conform it to.

Or... again, the ERC thing... you could make a midThigh and midShin part in the mesh, and then have the 'ghost' part lThigh and lShin affect it.

PhilC did the first one of the "mermaid style" I ever saw, his just worked off one leg. Actually works fairly well for some poses IF you are willing to do a lot of dial turning, it is a long way from really conforming.