I am using Poser 7 (no money for upgrade) and my next image (Faith from Mirror's Edge) requires a couple of gloves with cut fingers (without the tips, I mean).

Given an existing couple of gloves (with fingers), it should be possible to use the Grouping Tool to select the polygons I want to remove, create a new material for them and set it to invisible, right? But I've tried a couple of times without success. I don't know if the Grouping Tool is a little unfriendly to use, or if my age is too advanced for it. Maybe both.

Who can kindly explain me how to perform this procedure? Or point me to a tutorial for n00bs? Thanks!

Giorgio

You should be able to just hide the last joint of a finger to get a fingerless or cut fingered look for it. Remember: with clothing, hiding body parts of the clothing can often open up interesting options while at the same time, hiding the bodyparts of the underlying figure that you won't see will free up resources and is the perfect solution against pokethrough. -Les

 Mmmmm... yes, you are right, because in a finger there are separate body parts. I didn't think about it  (silly me).  /kicks himself.

But what if, for example, I want to cut a pair of pants? That is, making invisible just a section of a body part which does not have separate material zones?

Giorgio

You can use a free program like for exmaple wings3d to delete the polygons you don't want, or even change them  or you can just add a trans map to the part you want to hide.

When you display the group editor for your glove, create a New Group. Call it "HiddenGroup" or something.

Activate the "+" button. Select some polygons. They turn red and are now part of the HiddenGroup. If you pick a polygon by accident, activate the "-" button and touch the polygon again to remove it from the group.

Once you have the right polygons (and you can do this a little at a time, does not have to be done all at once), click on "Assign Material...". If you don't have your hidden material yet, type in "HiddenMaterial", otherwise choose it from the Materials pulldown button.

Put away the group tool.

Go into the material room. Find the "HiddenMaterial". Set:

Diffuse_Value = 0

Specular_Value = 0

Transparency = 1

Transparency_Falloff = 0

Should work now.
 

 Thanks BB! I'll try right this evening!

Giorgio

I forgot to add this.

The grouping tool seems unable to select polygons across actors. So you may have to repeat the whole process for each actor. If each finger or part of a finger is a separate actor, you'll have to create the hidden group on each and do all the steps ten times.

Q: the Grouping Tool

A: pure unadulterated evil

(Will work for this simple operation, just follow BB's directions, but for anything more complex group externally using a program that has better selection tools.)

The next simplest solution is a transparency texture.

 Am I the only one who actually likesthe grouping tool? L

That said, in a case like with the fingerless gloves, or a pair pof pants you want to make into shorts, it's not really needed. Just make the groups invisible. for gloves it's easy because the fingers on most characters are cut straight on the finger joints. Not always so on pants where they may be a lot more jagged. In that case I'd make a transparency map for the pants, it's much easier and you can even add a nice fringe if you like.

But don't shy away from the Grouping Tool. It won't bite, and it's capable of quite a lot - and personally I like that it does it all within Poser. 

One tip when selecting groups: Change the display mode to wireframe, that way you can select all sides of a model in one go. without bothering to rotate it and forget a polygon here and there. Good for the pants in question: Make a new group and assign a new material, then make that material invisible as per BB's instructions :)

You will most likely be disappointed with your results, as there never seem to be perfectly straight-edged polygons, ie there's always a pointy corner jagging up your selection.  Better to go with a transmap, which is real easy to create

Why not just export out the hand goups that you want to use as a glove as a wave front object?
 
You do that for each hand. Then you will have 2 glove .obj. Then you can scale up a tad and either parent to the hands or make  copies of the Figures Cr2 and point them/or it, depending if you exported each hand or both together, to the new .obj. as a conforming glove.

PS, I have that game so I know what your refering to. LOL.

But I did it this way to also show that you could just as easiely use the grouping tool and create a new material and add the new material and displacement to make it look more like a glove.

 Wow, Tashar! Very nice work! It's perfect!!

Giorgio