Hi, Gareee, lkendall, Joel.

I have been working out the low poly version of the geometry.  So far I have it down to 17K with all loaded (gens, teeth etc.) I decided to do it now since it will be very hard to cut down the figure later and still keep any UV mapping. I dont think I can get it much lower than 17K and still keep the integrity of the mesh.  The biggest poly pig in the face-head right now are the ears, the ones in there now are up over a 1000 poly's.  Got to pull some more out of them.

Anyway I would show you some pics of the low poly figure right now but I have been removing so many poly's and smoothing the results, that he does not have much shape left right now. I only have a few more to remove from the face and ears, and I will have a low poly Brad for animations. At 17K the divided mesh comes out to 68K for the high poly version, more than I wanted, but at least the low poly and high poly can match for UV's and all.

So thats where I have been.

Gareee, you are right, for the usual methods of geometry swapping it does indeed use system resources, since the alternate geometry is loaded into memory even when it is not in the scene. This is why I did not want to use geometry swapping.

And so, as lkendall pointed out, I am using a different aproach to achieve the same thing, that does not load any geometry into memory and is not built in at all. With this method the clothing is completely separate from the figure and is not referenced in the cr2 in any way, just like conforming clothes only without the need for its own rig and all underlying geometry actually gets removed from the scene. So you can have as many different sets of clothing you wish, just like conforming clothing.

The materials for the clothing are not referenced in the cr2 either, in fact nothing of the clothing is ever loaded untill you load it. For the JCM's in the clothing they will use regular empty morph channels, as per Cages and Anacents (sp?) instructions, on the insertion of JCM's from a pose file. The mats are inserted in the same manner, as well as joint changes.

This saves so much headache with clothing creation and use. Imagine all the time spent on poke through alone? Uneccessary! Or all the problems with scaling comforming clothjing? Uneccessary! Crosstalk? Doesn't exist. Many others.

There is a price.......Some of the things loaded into the figure cr2 cannot then be easily removed, at least I have not figured one out yet. So even though you remove the clothing and return the figure back to its naked state, there are unremoved lines left behind in the cr2, I am trying to figure out if there is a way to use remove poses to remove them.  But even if not, you would just not want to change clothes too many times in a single session.  Once you reload the figure of course you start over with a clean cr2.

I also might add that this does not preclude making conforming clothing for the figure just like any other figure. Brad in that respect is like any other figure.

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A HOMELAND FOR POSER FINALLY