Michaelab opened this issue on Dec 30, 2010 · 119 posts
pjz99 posted Fri, 31 December 2010 at 6:58 PM
If you want to model clothing (general steps):
Determine basic design, whether from a reference, or for an original design, whatever works (pencil and paper, 2d graphics program, or you can design right in the modeler like I do)
Import an un-morphed, zero pose character figure (e.g. Simon or V4 or whatever) to build the model around, to ensure a good fit and ergonomics.
Build the model of polygons in your modeling program of choice
If you're only going to apply simple color to the model, you can stop here. If you want to do anything with bitmapped textures or other material techniques, you want to UVmap the model. Read the link and others like it, it's too big a discussion for a single paragraph. Nearly all modeling applications include some form of UVmapping tools these days.
Export the geometry to the target application's format (e.g. Poser, export to OBJ format); this is often a lot more complicated than you expect. Several features in Poser require polygon groups be assigned (e.g. material zones, or body part groups) but Poser's native tools for assigning polygon groups are terrible for this purpose. It's a lot easier to do these polygon groups in the modeler and then export them with the geometry; getting this to work can be a challenge.
Import the model into the target application (e.g. Poser) and make sure all your groups etc. are correct
If the garment is to be treated as dynamic cloth, go to the Cloth Room and set up your simulation (see gobs of tutorial info from Phil Cooke and elsewhere)
If the garment is to be treated as a conforming figure, go to the Setup Room and rig it (look for tutorials on this, there are many)
A CR2 editor is just amazingly useful for many Poser content creation tasks, there are so many applications that are harder without one. Some tasks can be done within Poser but are just awkward; many tasks are simply impossible in Poser's native toolkit (removing junk materials, rename shader nodes, mass import or removal of morph targets, etc).