Quote - > Quote - While I will go on ad infinitum about the joys of 3D Coat, it is the perfect tool for creating dynamic clothes.  I know not everyone can afford it but I thought I'd mention it anyway (there are some videos about using 3d coat for making cloth meshes on my you toob too).

ok, now i'm curious.  why is 3d Coat the perfect tool for creating dynamic clothes?  edited to add: i'd always been interested in it as a substitute for getting ZBrush.

Well it goes like this :) 

3D Coat can import V4 (or whoever) as a voxel mesh, you can then sculpt the voxel mesh like clay to get your garment shape.  You can also add primitives to V4 to do skirts and stuff or add bulky detail.  3D Coat has a full set of primitives including Free Forms which I use alot.

Once you have your garment shaped you can then add the poly mesh.  Every vertex or poly you add in sticks to the Voxel like glue.  I start off putting big polys on the mesh then use the subdivide and relax tools to get the detail in.  every time you subdivide 3DC will automatically snap the new vertices and polys to the voxel mesh, so you dont have to worry about moving them around too much.  The relax tool then will adjust them poly mesh to fit the voxel better, loosening up snarl points and evening up the poly sizes.

You can then add material groups and create a uvmap.  The uving is so simple, add seams with the loops tool and unwrap it.  Relax the uvmap to flatten it and you are done.

Then it's a question of exporting the mesh and importing it to poser.  3DC will preserver the size and origin of the original V4, so as long as you don't move it around suring the scuplt and retopology tasks it will fit perfectly when you import into poser.

That in itself is worth alot, but 3D Coat also has a painting feature, so you can create your texture maps in there too.  It has a great range of tools for the job but also can integrate and synchronise with a traditional layered 2D painting program like Photoshop or PSP.  I've got all sorts of videos on my you tube site that shows you that stuff.

Oh and 3D Hobby have got about an hour of my videos in a resonable high resolution available as part of their first issue.  It's not clothes related but goes through the process of voxel sculpting, making the poly mesh and texturing which should give you a good idea of how 3DC works.

Hope that helps :)

John.

Fugazi (without the aid of a safety net)

https://www.facebook.com/Fugazi3D