for the easiest way create the base mesh for the dress

duplicate a loopcut to extrude for the lowest ruffle and subdivide it       then extrude it several times to make it move more like cloth

from there when you are happy with the poly count you can duplicate it and rescale to fit the next ruffle

but seeing the sheer fabrics of the ruffles you will need to seperate them by material zone and assigned color to make the difference in opacity

for the lace vertical trim an added plane with a tranparency map should work is set solid

Attached Link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6fhYqWNwCxo

never saw original post :-(

yeah thats a good way or for a dress use a couple of bezier circles

whats your plans once you get it into poser??

I tried a conforming one in P7!! was a pain an never looked good after poseing

might be better with weight mapping, be interested in seeing what you come up with

Right now, I'm having the damnedest time making the ruffle snap to the cursor. It's doing it, but I'm not doing something quite right because it's not following the curve.

Do look forward to seeing this when it is completed and thanks for sharing the tutorial been wanting to know how to do ruffles as well

good start

how you gonna handle that shape with dynamics?  cloth stiffness??

Fortunately, unless she's sitting down, there's no real need for dynamics. Except for the sleeves.

IIRC, LLF once pointed out that you can't really sit in real versions of dresses like that.  I think it was her, that is, I'm sure of the quote.  The person, who was speaking from experience,  said in real life people have to give you a stool sit on under the dress.

You can just make ruffles like those by extruding out, using a select every other n, and pulling in the appropriate direction.  If you need extra edge loops, cut one close to the join on the ruffles, then at least one before the end (so the ruffle has at least two internal loops with one close to the join). Select all the loops but the join and the loop next to it, then subdivide them as many times as you need.  I usually find no more than 3 works well, but you might need more for that topology.  Then use J to make the n-gons between the last subdivided divided loop and the loop before the join into quads and tris.  The tris will actually help with the rippling effect.

Think it is look really good EClark really good look forward to seeing the final product :thumbupboth:

Oh, and since it's perfectly symmetrical, you could use the mirror modifier and just do everything once instead of twice.

Quote - Oh, and since it's perfectly symmetrical, you could use the mirror modifier and just do everything once instead of twice.

Heh, actually That's how I had to do the second ruffle. For soem reason, I couldn't get it to follow the opposite curve I had made for it, so I just decided to mirror it instead. Saved a bunch of time.