Illustration #11 – Now we come to one of my favorite tricks and one which I’m sure you can use over and over again. In order to get our skirt’s waistband as close to the figure as possible we will actually get a cross section curve from the Poser figure itself. First we need to create a new layer and give it a different color, here I used green for the layer color. We make active the first layer, the one on which our Poser figure was brought in on and highlight the figure’s waist area, here shown in yellow.

 

Illustration #12 - Now before doing anything we activate our new green layer by placing a check mark by it. We go to the “Curve” menu --> “Curve from objects” --> “Section”

 

Illustration #13 – Holding down the “Shift” key to restrict our axis, we draw a line straight across the figure’s waist. Press enter or RMB click to finish the section selection process. We now have a curve which exactly fits the figure’s waist. To avoid crashing into the actual figure we would 2D scale it as we did above to make it slightly larger all the way around.

 

Illustration #14 – To make things easier to visualize I’ve hidden the Poser figure by clicking the visibility toggle (a little light bulb) shown in the layer’s dialog.

 

Illustration #15 – Now we can see the three curves we’ve created, you certainly can add more if you wish but three will be enough for our demonstration. Now to loft our bell skirt. Go to the “Surface” menu and click “Loft”. Starting from our bottom curve click one at a time and RMB click after the topmost and last one. You will then see that each of our curves has little white arrows indicating the direction of our curves. Satisfied that they are going in the same direction we RMB click again and a polysurface appears as well as the Loft dialog box. Leave the “closed Loft” option unchecked in the “Style” panel and select “Do not simplify” in the “Cross-section curve options” panel, click the “Preview” button to rerender.

 

If you’re not happy with the outcome, you can delete the polysurface before you polymesh to get the model and play around with the curves to your heart’s content until you do come up with something you like. Further, once you’ve created your model, I would take it into the clothroom in Poser and let it add more realism to it. Make a short animation maybe some 15 frames. Add a slight pose change somewhere halfway in the animation. You may have to add constraining vertices at the waist to keep it from falling to the ground. When the simulation is finished, play it back and see which frame offers the better view and export the mesh at that frame as an object file.

 

As a side note: You can use the trick outlined in illustrations 11-13 on your new skirt model to give cross-section curves for you to use on your tutu model just don’t forget to 2D scale them. Have fun and good luck!