Could Poser clothes figures be made so they can open by having the fronts be seperate body parts from the backs? Say a left and right abdo and chest that were ERCed to bend with the back abdo/chest but could also bend open like book covers rather than morphs being used for the effect? Could you even give pants a left and right flap parts attached to the hip so they could be opened at the fly? My dream has alwas been pants that could be opened and dropped to the hip or thigh... shirts that open without distortion... can buttons be non-bending body parts so they don't deform with torso bends? Just thinking. I can't model or rig clothes myself but I was wonder if the concept is viable.

There are several openable pants out there. I made some for the G2 males. They can be dropped as well ;)

It's not difficult to make shirts that open, there are some of those available as well (and I'm almost done with one btw)

It just takes time. And planning from the beginning of course. It has to be modeled with a non-welded seam where it should open. Then it's just a question of making some morphs that will allow it to do so - OR make the thing dynamic and just let it fall.

If you want to see a dynamic cersion of an open shirt, look at the one I made for THIS PICTURE 

momodot

What you're talking about can be done as far as making new groups and rigging in new bones, however the fly in the ointment comes into confoming. Conforming and Superconforming (I believe, if I';m wrong someone please correct me so I can learn!) depend on the groups in the clothing having the same names as the groups in the figure... The same problem for the buttons etc. if you don;t place them in the correct group then they won;t move/pose with the figure.

What I am saying is the core groups could be retained and additional groups added just as body handles can be added.... if there was an issue with the non-standard groups folllowing poses they could be moved by ERC or in some other way slaved to the standard parts.

Some hair has many body handle parts beyond the standard head/neck/chest/collars but still there are other hairs loaded with tons of morphs that are less controllable and more memory intensive then body handles... why?

Likewise... since you can add body parts while retaining posability and morphing (there are versions of Posette and Victoria 4 with extra breast parts) has any one attempted to use that method for moving parts of clothing? There is innumerable clothing with non-standard body parts that serve as body handles for posing skirts etc (kobomax skirts and jackets come to mind) but I have never seen visible rendering body parts as say the butt flap on a pair of Long Johns...

All the opening morphs I have personally had occasion to use suffer from serious rotation caused distortion, morphs just don't handle spatial rotational well with mesh stretch and shear... on the other hand if there was a way to morph, morph brush, or magnet without stretching mesh it could let you hand manipulate mesh the way it is manipulated in Cloth Room... permitting translation and rotation while restricting "stretch" so it can be manipulated spatially without "lateral" deformation along the surface... it would be cool. I'm just curious if anyone has tried added "visible" clothing parts"...

I have always favored body handles over morphs in general for dealing with soft tissue like breasts, buttocks, thigh and shoulders. Body handles even work well for manipulating facial features as opposed to morphs in some cases.

Quote - What I am saying is the core groups could be retained and additional groups added just as body handles can be added.... if there was an issue with the non-standard groups folllowing poses they could be moved by ERC or in some other way slaved to the standard parts. ...

Just my two coppers..

Part of the problem is that the intended portion of the clothing, be it a zipper/flap/shirt-half/whatever, is supposed to move and conform with the figure as WELL as then being able to be "opened/whatever."

Morphs allow the effect you are looking for to be done very easily while still keeping the clothing conformed appropriately.  Renaming part of the hip-group to "zipper", for instance, would put that zipper group out of the control of the figure skeleton during posing.  It would still follow the parent group and be able to be posed and such.  But, during most use, it may not give premium results.  Morphs don't always look right in all poses because the mesh is still trying to conform.  However, they give good, general results by themselves.

The simplest way is through morphs and that yields the best result in a wide-variety of circumstances.  After that, there are any number of ways you could go about it but each has its own caveats regarding cloth performance in all situations.  With a morph, you KNOW the clothing is going to conform appropriately - there are no special features you need to tweak to get it to work right.  Using other methods can work very well but, many could be extremely time consuming.  There are complex methods that could give excellent results.  BUT, that depends on whether or not the creator wants to spend the time creating the product to be optimized for posing in semi-disrobed state as well as functioning as a good general conformer.  Time>All.

To be honest, unless you're spending more time posing your figures with their pants down and shirts open rather than fully clothed, it just makes sense to model the cloth so that it has maximum performance capacity during regular posing use with the option for decent performance when disrobing.  /shrug

Renaming part of the hip-group to "zipper", for instance, would put that zipper group out of the control of the figure skeleton during posing.

I figured JCM or ERCcould fix that but I don't know nothin :0)

To be honest, unless you're spending more time posing your figures with their pants down and shirts open rather than fully clothed, it just makes sense to model the cloth so that it has maximum performance capacity during regular posing use with the option for decent performance when disrobing.*

Isn't that what Poser is all about? There have been thousands of Poser clothes made... certainly thousands of nearly identical Poser stripper clothes and fantasy warrior steel bikinis made... an outfit or two with fancy rigging like that wouldn't break all the other outfits ;) I would have thought it would have come up simply as a technical challenge. Anyway, there are more sites dedicated to Poser Porn than to NVIATWAS. It is time to Free Willy.

This is what dynamic cloth is for. ;-)

Body handles are easy to apply to conforming skirts etc. because they can be grouped to one actor i.e. the hip) without losing more functionality than a conforming skirt does anyway. In other words, it's making the best of a bad job...

However body handles for an opening jacket, for example, would often have to influence more than one of the "basic" actors of the clothing: chest and one collar, most probably. Maybe it could be done with ERC, but I figure life is too short when the cloth room is a click away.

In your other example of clothing that can be slid down the figure, the problem here is that it needs to stop being conforming at some point. A pair of pants which started off conforming the the figure's hip would not work very well when they were positioned around their knees. Again, some would say that clothing that falls off is the natural M.O. of the cloth room anyway. But not me. ;)