im working on a dress for V3, and im wondering how the heck would you make it bend correctly when the character kneels? i mean the center part has to be the hip, and obviously it won't know to bend when you bend the knees. i was able to change the weld settings to make the dress fit perfectly and move very smoothly, but if the character kneels it all goes to hell lol

In the dress, have you included bones for the left and right buttock and thigh? That is the only way that I know how to do it. (It is still a pain).

hmm i dont use bones, i just make the conformer and then use pwizard to conform it to the figure

Attached Link: http://www.morphography.uk.vu/modtut7.html

What I've been doing recently is grouping the skirt so that the lThigh and rThigh parts are adjacent, not separated by a thin strip of hip as is usual. You then have to add an extra weld statement to the CR2 (see link). If it's a long dress, you need to do the same for the shin parts. Works for me, anyway. The idea isn't new - I got it from the PoserStyle Mediaeval dress.

one more question; when you make a dress for V2 or V3, should you be including the rButtock and lButtock sections in your mesh? or should you just skip them and change weld statements so that the lThigh and rThigh sections are welded to the hip?

In that skirt above (and in lots of others that I've seen for Vicki) there are no buttock parts - the grouping goes straight from hip to lThigh / rThigh (sounds like a diet, doesn't it? ;-) ). I've had trouble making things work with buttock parts in there, they never seem to bend properly; but I can't explain why it works better without them either. Hell, I'm new at this myself. It seems to go against the rules, but as I say, it's not just me doing it.

I haven't a clue about any of this (love your site, EnglishBob, what a great resource)...but it makes sense if you think about a human skeleton. The thigh bone is connected to the hip bone...the buttocks are a muscle (and, in my case, fat) and not a joint. The poser model is based vaguely on the human structure, no?

lol very true, im not sure why a buttocks part was ever added to michael or vicki, doesn't seem to make much sense =P

Ooh, ooh, I know, I know! ^_~ If you go back to Eve, who was largely Posette resliced, she had buttocks as a sort of blend zone. They weren't meant to be moved, but rather as an aid to realistic deformation when the thighs were moved. At least, that's what I've been told. OK, with the extra weld statement, do you ever get the dealy where Poser tries to find a vertex at infinity and you get this long pointy triangle sticking out of your dress? Do you know what causes that? I'd gotten that recently with a mesh, and I never figured out why, because when I pulled that mesh into the PW medieval dress, it worked fine.