Can someone help me with this. I'm trying to create my first conforming cloth but can't remember the last steps (that i read about in a tutorial a couple of years ago....can't find it again). I have my wavefront object and the necessary bodyparts in it. And - as i remember - i should be able to, after importing it (to Poser 4 !!!!) and fitting it to a figure, whith the use of the groupingtool and later a "host cr2" make it a working conforming cloth. But somewhere on the way i'm doing something wrong and ends up with only one of the bodyparts when i load my newly made conforming figure. If someone has a clue, please tell me.

I'm not a frequent writer in this forum and would like to take the oppurtunity to thank all of you people in here for sharing your knowledge, ideas, opinions, links and much more to all.

A lot of the discussion you will hear on this involves either; A) borrowing the bones of an existing figure via the Setup Room, which appeared in Poser Pro-Pack, or; B) creating a new figure from scratch, generally via the Phi method. In Poser 4 the options are a little different. Just so we understand the basics: a conforming clothing item is one that shares the "bones" (aka the joint centers, rotation orders, and most of the joint parameters) of the figure it is conformed to. It only needs the body parts it covers; a skirt, for instance, does not need to have bones for the head and hands. (Actually, good practice is to have ONE body part past the last part of the conforming clothing item. So a long-sleeved shirt would include rHand, lHand.) Poser applies it's particular magic by looking for a matching body part name in the conforming item, and giving it exactly the same rotations as the body part it is conformed to. So the other essential is that the conforming item needs to have the same names as the body parts it covers, and be sliced close to the same places the body is sliced. But back to the Poser 4 method. The dead-simplest method, and the one most clothing creators use, is to make a "donor" cr2. This is a copy of the cr2 of the figure you mean to conform to, with all morphs deleted, all extraneous body parts taken out (aka fingers, eyes.....ouch...!), all materials taken out, IK chains deleted. This can be done in a text editor, or with the fine program "cr2Edit" (http://www.zenwareonline.com/cr2edit/cr2edit.html). Also, DAZ makes available for many of their figures a "distributable" cr2 that amounts to the same thing. Lastly, you can borrow the cr2 from a similar item of clothing -- at least, most people don't mind if you do (and you will be editing it anyhow). The next trick is to go into the cr2 and change the two geometry pointers (figureResFile :Runtime:Libraries:Geometries....) to point at your new mesh. Install your modified cr2 and your new geometry into Poser's Runtime. If you've done everything correctly up to this point you will be able to browse to the shrugging man for your new figure and load it to the scene. Inspect, check for tearing and all that....well, to cut a long story short, at this point it's all fine-tuning the joint parameters, setting materials, and saving the edited version back to your library. Clear as mud? Oh, last advice....get BL Render's "Secrets of Figure Creation with Poser 5." Forget the version-specific title. This is a treasury of how to put new content into Poser, and THE desktop reference if you mean to keep at it.

Hmmm.......sounds like i'm overdoing it. If i understand you right the use of the grouping tool is unnecessary. But I do need to fit my newly created item to the character i'm supposed to use it on and export it once again.....or? Anyway, thanks for your answer and your suggestions.

Ah, no. You DO need to "slice" your item. You can do that in your modeling application (name polygon group works fine), in UVmapper (of all things), or in Poser proper using the Grouping tool. Oh, and the Setup Room in Pro-pack and above includes an auto-group function, but it makes too many mistakes for most people to be happy with it. There are probably other options I am unfamiliar with, or have simply forgotten -- I slice in Carrara as the last stage of my modeling. IF you use the grouping tool in Poser....hrm, trying to remember last time I tried this. I believe you would need to spawn props, then export the results. In re your other question -- yes, your clothing MUST fit the zeroed figure. A little explanation here first; the majority of Poser figures are saved to the library, and are brought into a scene, with some small joint rotations and other displacements. Your conforming clothing, when conformed, takes on the same joint rotations as the figure. So if you don't fit to a zero'd figure you are basically moving it twice, and it won't work right, not at all. Two ways to check the fit of your mesh. One is to load the conform-to figure from the library in the usual fashion. Turn of IK on both legs. Open the joint editor and hit "zero figure." Now check both BODY and hip channels to make sure there is no translation (often, there will be a small y translation there). The other, more straight forward way, is to select "import" and browse to your own Runtime directory and load the geometry in directly. Uncheck everything -- you don't want to change its scale or position. Now, import your clothing object. If you have reason to believe your clothing object already fits, then import with all those "on floor, centered, percent figure size et al" unchecked. Observe carefully. If the base objects/zeroed figures match perfectly, then nothing further needs to be done with your .obj file. Use it as it. If it does NOT align perfectly...scale, translate, apply magnets, whatever you need. When you've got your clothing fitting properly, export the clothing item as an .obj file with certain boxes checked; "body part names" and "keep existing groups." (I'm going from memory here -- trying to finish breakfast and get off to work -- so these names may not be exact.)

follow nomuse's directions, the only thing i would add is this:

i group in my 3d program, borrow a "blank" cr2 and edit, put the cr2 and the obj file together in your runtime:geometries and your runtime:libraries folder.

i've been trying to do the same thing as you for about 3 weeks now and kept having problems, i was adding too many steps from too many tutorials, which ultimately kept things from working. so i just went down and dirty with a simple obj file and a borrowed cr2 until i got it to work...after it worked it turned out to be quite simple in the end.

keep at it!

All of the above is good information.  I'd simplify it a bit further with the following generalities:

1. import the target figure's .obj file into your modelling app (the .obj file from the geometries folder - don't bother trying to zero the figure and export one, just use the one the .cr2 points to).  Note that Poser meshes are very small... it's generally best to scale it up when you import it (I normally scale it up by 1000).

2. model your clothing item around the target mesh.

3. if your modelling app will let you create 'groups', do that now. *** NOTE *** group names are cAsE-sPeCiFiC - they must match the naming in the .cr2 file exactly.

4. if your modelling app will let you create material zones, do that now.

5. if your modelling ap will let you UV map the item, do that now.

6. export your new clothing item - if you scaled the target mesh UP by 1000 when you imported it, be sure to scale the clothing DOWN by 1000 when you export it.

7. if needed, load your model into UVMapper and uv-map, group and/or create material zones.

8. Edit a .cr2 file of the target mesh figure (use the 'BLANK' one, if there is one) and just change the two geometry lines at the top of the file to point at your clothing item instead of the figure mesh.

9. fire up poser, load the target figure, load your clothing item (using the new .cr2 you created) and conform it to the figure.

10. save the clothing item .cr2 to the library again.

...as noted above, you don't really need all the extra finger joints and such, but Poser won't complain if they are there, so the easiest path is to just use the full file to start with.  Once you're comfortable that that's working ok, you can look into how to delete all the un-used data from the file.

Assuming that you have some means of creating the groups (you can make them in UVMapper), you never need to 'import' the mesh into Poser.  But If you do decide to use the Group Editor within Poser to create the groups, uncheck all options on import, create the groups and re-export the .obj file - there's no need to 'Spawn Props'.

Cheers,

Keith

Thank you very much! With this information I really think i will have a chance to make things work. And hopefully i will be able to create something really nice. I will let you all know if i succeed.