I wanted to do an open zipper morph on my cat suit, but I wasn't quite sure about the smartest way to do it, the way that would involve the least amount of needless work. For those of you who already know this trick, this is going to be a "no duh" moment.  But for me, this was kind of an "oh wow" realization. 

I was confused by the Daz Supersuit when I first saw it. Before I wanted to make a working zipper, this is what got me thinking about the issue. On the one hand, I knew exactly what the supersuit was.  It was an edgeloop suit, just like any of Midnight_Stories' edgeloop suits (other than the fact, I would presume, that Midnight_Stories' meshes are original, and the SuperSuit is just Genesis with some toe caps, a few extra edgeloops, and the nose, lips and ears lopped off).  But how did the supersuit do what it did? How could you inflate the various edgeloop regions?  I could imagine a tedious way of setting up those morphs, manually masking and inflating the geometry,  but that didn't seem like a smart way to make something.  I knew it had to have been made more cleverly than that, and that clever way would save me time doing my zipper morph.

In Poser and Studio, there are two kinds of groups.  You've got the grouping that goes with the rigging, your bodyparts, and you've got your material groups.  In zBrush (so far as i know), you've just got one single system of groups. You can have material groups, you can have body groups, but you can't have both. So what I would do would be model my outfit, do my grouping based on what I wanted my material groups to be, go into poser and assign those groups materials, then run the mesh through autogroup, do some tweaking, and then run it through quick conform.  I would never see the material groups in zbrush again, as, in order to make morphs, I would have to morph the mesh that had the body groups.  Loading a full body morph in any of the tools I use in conjuction with Poser 7 (Morph IMP more recently, earlier PhilC's Poser Toolbox), that didn't have the same bodygroups, will cause them to crap themselves.  Studio's no different.

From a materials group stand point, I could have things like zip pull, left zipper teeth, right zipper teeth, etc.  As, for something supersuit like, you might have a left pec pad and a right pec pad and all the loops that surround them in order to facilitate your inflating that group and allowing an inlaid boarder. From a body groups stand point, in either example, that would all just be chest.  In zbrush, then, to open the zipper (or inflate the pec pad), I'd have to mask half of the suit (and more of a hastle, half of those zipper teeth), and then pull the other half away (in the supersuit like example, mask off everything but the pec pad, hit inflate).  Then repeat for the other side (or the loops in the supersuit like example, or any other "pad"). If I could select half of those teeth at once and mask them, it'd be much easier (or just select the pad or it's loops), but if I was going to load that morph into poser (as far as my experience has taught me), I'd be forced to make the morph on a mesh where that kind of simple selection was no longer possible.

Here what I  figured out to work around that false limitation:

In both Poser and Studio, your grouping situation doesn't have to match up when you're just loading morphs into an obj.  So I can make the morph on the material group version of the mesh and load it into the body group version of the mesh obj in either program.  Then I can export out the new morphed body group version and load that in as a morph in the cr2 via morph imp in poser or the morph loader tools in studio.

I know, for many of you, the response to that is "no duh".  Still, for others, this is useful new info. This how I was able to make the zipper morph work without driving myself crazy masking off zipper teeth one by one, and this is how the morphs for an inflating edgeloop suit like the supersuit could also be done in zbrush, added  to a  cr2, and saved out for us poser 8 minus users.

Hmmm, M4 and V4 inflating edgeloop suits by Midnight_Stories with heroic/scifi/fantasy poser materials by BagginsBill and Parrotdolphin?

@Daz3d
@ShareCG