Laurie, both the launchs of Ana and of V4WM has reminded me of this.

Conforming clothing is a crutch, and a poor one at that. When I first started with Poser, I thought it was great because it was a simple solution that worked. Now that I'm seven years into the hobby, it is the very thing that keeps tripping me up and slowing me down. I wish I had a dime for everytime I've started with a conforming item and either had to take it to the cloth room to clothify some portion of it, export it to make it an obj file, or simply go back and substitute a dynamic piece in its place!

I'm not sure if any changes have been made to the cloth room that have caused it to give better results, or if it's simply that it seems like second nature to me now. At any rate, I can usually get what I want in terms of effect far better in the clioth room than out of it.

You are a modeller... riddle me this: How much extra time/labor is it, once you have made a piece and done all the conforms and morphs to also release a dynamic version of the package? This would really be the next great sales point in my book... market your piece in BOTH formats AT THE SAME TIME! I assume the same textures would work for both pieces... all of the addon textures would work... AND the artist gets the sales from both conforming and dynamic markets. One OBJ now generates TWO income streams, and the add-ons now have more units in the field to drive their sales.

Of course, there may be no OBJ compatability and the change from conforming to dynamic could be a nightmare. I don't know.

If this will work, it sounds like a "bigger return on very little extra work" solution, and the added variety of dynamic clothing available will be the very thing that should spur its increased use.

I wish I could convince all of my more casual colleagues to just watch ONE cloth room tutorial. That was all it took to get me convinced and started. What held me back was the scarcity (until recently) of clothing. I've tried to support Grappo and the few other artists who create dynamic clothing, and there is more and more of it becoming available.

Perhaps if you could put a tutorial together on how to do the grouping for dymanic use, Laurie? From things you have posted in the past, I assume this is about all there is to making a dyanamic piece "work." Perhaps another on the modifications that need to be made to conforming meshes to make them compatible? (My exported OBJ's often as not fall apart in the cloth room.)

Sorry to be so long winded, but this is a direction I personally would like to go with the hobby. I even bought Pegasus, hoping I could learn to model with a tool that simple, but even that is proving hard for me to master. I'm keeping after it, and one of these days, I'm going to need the tut's to finish up a piece.

Who will step up to help?