kimbersue opened this issue on Oct 24, 2012 · 44 posts
bagoas posted Sun, 28 October 2012 at 5:25 PM
It largely lines up with my workflow, but since we're at it let me add a few more tips that may smooth the learning curve:
When making the avatar think ahead want you want to do. If you want to make conforming clothing taking the base figure is fine. If you want to make dynamic clothing keep in mind that any stretch and stress in the clothing is lost when you take the mesh from MD into Poser. If you start your dynamic fitting in Poser, the cloth starts to stretch again and the result look like clothing that is over-washed and saggy. So best is to export also a morphed figure to MD with less pronounced/shunk curves in the places where there is pressure, typically breasts, buttocks. MD can show where the stretch/pressure in the clothing is. The draping step in the Poser cloth room (at least in Version 9/Pro2012) in general can handle the poke-trough.
A second thing to decide is whether you use an avatar with the arms say 50 degrees down (MD default) or horizontal like most Poser figures. If you do stiff clothing like jackets (see image), arms down will give the best results. Jackets are tailored that way and if you model them with arms level in neutral position in a dynamic cloth you will get very un-natural behavior (squeezing in) of the sides of the jacket if the poser figure lowers his arms. In conforming cloth you get ugly stretch of the fabric at the shoulder if the figure lowers his arms. Most natural solution is therefore to use a pose with the arms lowered, but this makes injecting the rig more difficult.
Alternative solution, fit the clothing to the avatar with lowered arms, but raise them horizontal before exporting the mesh does not give optimal results either. The folds that occur are 'frozen' in the mesh and will not disappear when the arms of the conformer are lowered. The Poser Setup Room does (did?) not accept a posed rig for injection.
My preferred solution is therefore to use a base figure with lowered arms. Angela and Ang by Ali (available at Mankahoo) have lowered arms in zero position and are good candidates. They are also quite similar in shape to the default MD avatar and can wear a lot of the clothing patterns in the MD store as-built or with only minor tweaking. Anyone who wants to try the MD-Poser bridge without going too deep into MD cloth tweaking should give these figures serious consideration. I add a few images of Angela with 'straight from the rack' clothing by Marvelous Designer.
Whether you use an avatar with arms lowered or on in T-pose, in any case make sure the arms are straight when you fit the clothes on. Bent elbows like Antonia and some of the Victorias are a nuisance when fititing.
Last but not least: Miki4's rigging is not supported well in MD. Zero pose is OK, but posing her there with lowered arms or loading a so-posed avatar yields a situation where the upper half of the upper arm reamins horizontal and the reat of the arm goes down. So for Miki4 best use .obj prop avatars and load poses as morphs.
There are some startup problems, true, the technique is fairly new, but it is very doable right now to make clothing for Poser with MD and has great potential.
Have fun.