I have tried to solve this on my own, but I'm at a point that I decided to seek advice from others who have worked on models of cloths - I have this nice pair of pants I made, but when the thigh is bent it starts to deform at the crotch - does anyone have an idea as to what I should try to solve this?  Is this a mesh problem or a joint editor issue?  I've tried tweeking the mesh a bit and I've tried adjusting the joint parameters but I'm kind of flying blind here [heh]

The larger picture is the way the pants look when I load them and conform them to a figure that is just standing there, the two renders on the right show a closeup of the problem - the top one is at a 30 degree angle  and the one below has the camera at 0 degrees [streight on front]

Im no expert on this, as I have never succesfully modelled a thing in my life (respect to all who can)
I have however found, that a lot of people who do create clothing, usually add a morph target to the figure, that is sometimes named a fix... Probably a quick and nasty way of approaching the problem, but hopefully this will help....   

A good thought ... I had been thinking about doing that to deal with poke through but I hadn't thought about using it for fixing this.  I'll have to do some experimenting to see about that.

clean up and adjust your grouping.

I have tried a number of times to modify the mesh but I'm not sure just where to make adjustments that will solve this.  I've altered the line between the hip and the thighs and it has helped a bit but exactly what would solve it seems to elude me.

I'll show you what the mesh looks like - I've made the hips and thighs different colours so you can see the separate groups.

Now, I'm not good at modeling pants (because I always fight that area as well), but I would remove the two rows of polygons on the inner thighs, so that the Hip is only a very very narrow row of pixels between the legs.

I'm not sure if it would fix it, but it's worth a try at least :o)

I can give that a try - you know, in future I think I'm going for dresses and kilts rather than pants [heh]

First - pardon my weary old eyes, but it's hard to discern what's going on in your pictures!  I can tell that something has a problem, but I can't really tell what's going on - so this is a bit of a stab in the dark (but usually good advice anyway).

That said, I must agree with ernyoka1.   Your hip-group shouldn't be shaped like granny panties - you should have something that only includes the bare minimum amount of pixels between the legs.

Top, good.  Bottom, bad.

Ok, I'll  try the suggested modification.  Oh, and here's a new picture of the problem.   As you can see, there is a sort of flap of cloth sticking out which shouldn't be there.

FireMonkey, part of our problem definately IS that your coming too far down the inner thigh with the Hip group. You need to keep the Hip group between the legs as narrow as possible with 2 or 4 narrow rows of verts. The next thing to check is to be sure your Burrock Group Joint fall off zone isn't picking up the oposite leg. Use the Joint Control Panal and select the "Bend" zones, be sure that the inner (green) sperical fall off zone isn't over lappig the opposite leg.

 

mike

 

 

 

Hmmm, the point about overlap with the other leg is a good one - I'll check that out as well.

It's funny, clothing seems to be harder than most things I've done and here I expected it to be easier [heh] just goes to show I guess.

Actually, modeling the clothes aren't the tricky part (assuming one knows how to model at all of course) - it's making it Poser ready and conforming that's a bitch. That's also why Dynamic clothes are so nice GG No grouping, no pesky joint parameters...

That said, I still prefer conforming clothing to dynamic in 99% of the cases. It's only stuff like flowing dresses and long robes that really benefits from dynamics.

True enough - the modeling was easy - it turned out just the way I wanted it, it was only when I tried to make it work right in Poser that there were any problems [heh] mind you, since my purpose is Poser and specifically creating things for animation in Poser, this is an important flaw [grin]

I find the joint editor the toughest part though - I've read everything I can on it and in all but one case the stuff in books and tutorials all end up saying something like "Well, we can't explain how to use the joint editor, you really have to just do it and you'll get the hang of it with practice."  Dr Geep is the only one who has done a tutorial I have read that actually explains anything about using the joint editor.  The books and the other tutorials all seem to want to make a mystery out of it whereas I'm wanting to understand it [sigh]

But give me time - right now I think the next pair of pants I do will work much better because of what I've learned this time - but retrofiting solutions is a lot more work than avoiding the problems in the first case.  However, soon I hope to have this last problem solved and then I can relax for 5 minutes before starting on my next challenge [grin]

The grouping can help, but your primary problem is the Joint Parameters as trav suggests above.  Except that he left out the Outter falloff zone... here's the deal:

• Everything inside the green sphere (of that body-part, or it's direct parent) gets affected.

• Everything outside of the red sphere is completely not affected (except for children of that part).

• The polygons between the green and red spheres (the 'falloff zone') are affected less and less, the closer they are to the red sphere (outward from the green sphere).

• All of the above is over-ridden and/or constrained by the Joint Angles, where similar rules apply (everything between the green bars moves intact, everything outside the red bars is not affected, everything between the green and red bars is the deforming area).

• Always keep in mind:  Children can affect their parents, but not thier grandparents or siblings.

...so, you should start by setting up the Joint Angles... use the Front Camera (or make sure your camera is not rotated) and drag the bars around so they're in the right place - in particular, the red bar that points down through the crotch area - it should not overlap/encompass anymore polygons of the hip than you want to be affected, but it should be far enough to get the ones you do want affected (I suspect that this might be your current problem).  If the angle needs to be wide to include some of the crotch polygons but that angle also causes includes some other polgons that you don't want affected then...

Once the bars are in the right place, you can use the spherical falloff zones (red and green spheres) to further limit and refine the deforming area.

Yeah, Spanki, you're right, I rushed that post... It was late and I was too tired, should have waited. Thanks for the explanation.

mike

 

Actually you can fix problems like the one above by using the Joint Edito to adjust the center points and bend points of the thighs. Anyone who's used Wardrobe Wizard has run across this sort of thing at least once. Hehehe...Time to break out that handy dandy Joint Editor in Poser!

Spanki: "- Always keep in mind:  Children can affect their parents, but not thier grandparents or siblings."

 I'm the father of 4 daughters so I can say with authority that you are correct - mine made me lose my hair ..... oh wait, you were meaning with models [grin]

Seriously, you have explained the basic issues of joint editing quite well and your point about the joint angle and in particular the bar that should be pointing down - I've just spent a couple hours playing with falloff zones and several times I have thought I had it right only to change camera angle and discover there is still a problem [often a new one] that I simply couldn't see from the angle I had been looking [heh]  I think you might be right that the trouble is in that one little bar - it fits with what I've been seeing in terms of how the polys seem to be effected.  Anyway, I shall try going to that first and then play with the zones....

trav: Not to worry - by posting when you did you gave me a more productive path to follow - even if there were details missing, I believe I got closer than I would have and ultimately it will have helped me solvce this problem.

Mizrael: I started working on the center points before I finally came here for advice - it did help a lot [in fact it solved 2/3rds of the problems I had at first] but sadly it didn't solve everything - I sometimes think that if I had a 3D holographic monitor rather than working with perspective and all that perhaps I would be able to get these things right faster [heh]

In the image above, I painted over your pants to illustrate the way things relate to one another.. I don't have your mesh or .cr2 file, so take the angle lines and zones placements with a grain of salt, but you should end up with something "similar" to that.

Note that the red angle line pointing into the crotch area has to actually encompass some of the other leg in order to include some of the polygons in the hip that we want... but then the red spherical zone clips off and better defines the boundries of which polygons will be deformed.

Be careful moving the centers around... it's probably best to leave those placed exactly where the figure's joints are located.

Try checking the zones and angles in the Front, Side and Top cameras - they don't include any perspective (and don't let you freely rotate), so they can help out a lot when trying to line things up.

If you're not using one of those cameras, you might also try changing the display type of the spherical zones to wireframe instead of outline to help you see thier orientation.

 

...also, my illustration above is something you'd more likely see when editing the 'side-to-side' joint, instead of the 'bend' (for the bend, the angles face the other direction, into the screen), so again, it's just to show how the angles and zones relate to each other.

 

...this one is a little better, because it indicates that the deformation zone is weighted... polygons closer to the inner sphere are deformed more than the ones closer to the outter sphere :).