I didn't want to use the other thread for this even though it's sorta kinda the same thing. I have a dress for Roxie. I abandoned the belt thing, and instead decided to include a zipper. But here's the thing. I can see where this is going to be messier than the belt. Short of molding each tooth individually from the mesh there's no real way to attach the zipper so that it will survive the clothification in Poser. It's gonna fall apart like pearl necklace with a broken string.

So what group do things like buttons and zippers belong to anyaway? and should I bother to put them on the dress?

I'm asking because while i want people to buy the dress I also want them to use it. I don't want anyone to buy a dress then not beable to use it properly. I'm hoping that if I can't set up the groups for them in advance, the least I can do is give thej the proper settings  and groups for the things to work right.

Or maybe I shouldn't bother putting things like butoons and zippers on dresses and clothes?

in poser thising like buttons should be set as a ridgid decorated group. I don't know if a zipper would be  hard or soft.

You can put buttons and zippers on, I would however not model the zippers with individual locks as it will kill the cloth simulator and to be honest i doubt any software out there could handle that very well.

However you have several options, either you make it part of the dress texture, which would make it possible to open and close the dress using morphs.

Another way could be to make a long chamfer box or just a box and texture that as the zipper which would give it some depth. And then use soft body in Poser to make it follow the dress dynamics. This would prevent you from open and closing the dress. 

So you could split it into two shapes one for each side with half a zipper on each.

But in either case, to make the zipper you probably need to look into bump maps and preferable normal maps. And how to use them in poser.

Normal maps in basic allow you to make a very detailed zipper which you can then transfer to a simpler shape using a normal map, and thereby get more details into it. However i havent worked a lot with this so maybe someone knows how they work in poser and if you need to do something special for them to work. 

You can see an example of what it does here:

As you can see the mesh of the character is very low res but with the normal map you get a lot more details.

http://features.cgsociety.org/newgallerycrits/g18/172618/172618_1205029919_large.jpg

"I'm hoping that if I can't set up the groups for them in advance, the least I can do is give thej the proper settings  and groups for the things to work right."

When the dress is completed the zippers should end up being part of the dress object, and the groups are saved with the dress, so if you make the zippers soft bodies and save it to your librabry they are preserved with the dress everytime you load it in a scene. 

I would suggest that you start just by making a very simple button and test how it works in poser with the soft body, so you get a very good idea how to handle the zipper, as i would expect it to give you some problems, if not a lot, as its not the most easy thing to get to work i think. 

And once again, it all comes back to textures and maps, and that's where I get stymied.

If you are going to model the zip as an object, it should be put in the rigid redorated group. Then it will move with the dress but not lose its shape. As explained above, even this is not a good idea. Put the zip in the texture and give it depth with displacement, saving yourself a lot of headaches.

What makes you buy dynamic over conforming? I understand the realism aspect, but is there something about the way the dress looks that makes you want to buy it in the first place? How detailed do you want a dress to be? Especially when it comes to things like ruffles, zippers, buttons, and cut outs?

Quote - What makes you buy dynamic over conforming? I understand the realism aspect, but is there something about the way the dress looks that makes you want to buy it in the first place? How detailed do you want a dress to be? Especially when it comes to things like ruffles, zippers, buttons, and cut outs?

Personally, I like dynamic clothing on which I can use any material in the material room.  That means having the ruffles, buttons, zippers, etc. at least mapped separately, if not as separate objects attached to the outfit.  Cut outs need to be built into the geometry instead of trans maps to use the materials, too.

Since the reason I like dynamic clothing better is because it moves and drapes without dealing with poke through and motion morphs, I like both flowing dresses and body-hugging pants/leggings.  I seem to add dresses with ruffles and belled skirts (long or short) immediatly and add pants and less frilly tops and dresses to my wishlist to be bought when I get around to it.  I think I have about everything Tipol has made in my runtime.

@ pigfish you really shouuld look at MD mate (ess) think you'll like it

make the most of the demo its a weeks worth of beer lol

 

@EClark you asked the same (ish) Q here an blender forum and got same answers (more or less)

people like the IDEA of dynamic ! but its more work then conforming

you could make a really great dress with an extensive readme of how to do it

but if the peeps dont read it !!!!!!

work more on hybrid ;-) dynamic skirts (frills' not tried that lol )

make it easy for the END user to get good results

 

That's why I always read the Poser features wish list with a grain of salt. Most people only use Poser for one or two of it's features at a time. I've yet to use the soft bullets feature or the constraining features for animation. And some people gthreaten to never use Poser again if they don't include their favorite feature in the next version.

But I do think that the cloth room, once the Poser team irons out a few more wrinkles and makes it more user friendly, and the hair room have the potential to be big marketing tools for Poser.

I don't do much with hair, but I am making dynamic clothes. but the devil is in the details.

Im not sure why people think the cloth room is so complicated, in my experience you rarely have to change any settings there. And if you do its very few of them. Otherwise its pretty much just to add the objects that you wish to collide with the cloth you have to add. Especially if the cloth is already made, then the vendor should have already set all the settings.

"But I do think that the cloth room, once the Poser team irons out a few more wrinkles and makes it more user friendly, and the hair room have the potential to be big marketing tools for Poser."

What they could do was to add predefine cloth settings, so you just selected the type of cloth you wanted in a list. But besides that i cant really see how they could make it a lot easier.

I do however wish they could improve the hair room, but then again these are really complicated in other apps as well and very hard to get good results with. Meaning the tools for working with dynamic hair are not easy to use to get something good out of. Also why you find very few tutorials on how to actually style hair for dynamic use, they are pretty much all just "then you can add hair or fur to this ball, just by doing this and that" but never how you create something that a human would wear, at least thats my impression :D

Ok, I'm going to just said ditto to what 3D-mobster said.  Generally the only problem I have in the clothroom is the time it can take to run a simulation. The other day I had one running that took over 24 hours to do. I thik it was only 30 frames too. I let it run because I really wanted to use that dress.

As far as saved dynamic settings, Philc has some in free stuff. And SVDL made a script for using them

I think including cloth presets should be a given in the Cloth room. The average person has no clue as to what those settings should be let alone learning how to set them up. It would also be helpful if, when defining groups, that you had someway of letting people know what group a material belongs to... i.e. buttons, zippers, rhinestones, belts and straps.

These are from SM, thats a good starting point:

More information can be found here:

http://my.smithmicro.com/tutorials/2313.html

 

Here's a little more of what i mean when I say the presets should be included. Here's the way Blender incorporates Cloth presets.

That's because Blender rocks!

BTW, Clarkie, don't know if this will help but a while back I was in a similar situation.  I wanted to have a go at some clothes and was debating pretty much the same thing, conforming or dynamic.

In the end I settled on a trick, one that would give the real look of dynamic cloth but is actually conforming.  The idea is to create the clothes inside Poser in sections and then export them out and weld the parts together, sounds a bit weird but hear me out.

So let's say you wanted to make a dress for Roxie, you want to use Dynamic cloth but it's too tempramental and way too slow to give decent live feedback.  All you have to do is think about how a garment is sewn together from sections of cloth, pretty much like in Marvelous Designer, and do it bit by bit inside Poser using single dynamic sheets.

Lets say you took Roxie and wrapped a single dynamic sheet around her waist.  It's dead easy to handle because it's just a single sheet, but that single sheet forms the bottom part of the skirt.  Once you've simulated it by letting it drape, just export it as an obj and move onto the next section.  The next section overlaps the skirt so it would be the top half of the dress.  Again, let it drape and enjoy the speed due to the simplicity of a sheet.

Export that part as an obj as well.

So you build-up a collection of obj sections that have been converted to obj.  All you have to do now is join them together in Blender to make a single obj dress mesh.

It might sound crazy but it's a very powerful way to do it, because you have perfect control over each successive drape, one over the other, soft over soft or soft over hard.  The result is that when you connect it all up in Blender into a single dress mesh, you willl have proper folds and creases from the dynamics even though the dress is a static mesh you could use for a conforming dress.

At this point you might think, well, I suppose it would work but who wants to be using square sheet sections for each part of the dress?

You don't, you can knock out any shape sheet you want in Blender and import that into Poser to clothify it.  Basically, those cloth sections you see in Marvelous Designer can be made in Blender, subdivided, exported, and brought into Poser as "patterns" where all you need to do is clothify these pattern objects and drape them dead easy.

When you work with small sections like that, you enjoy it more because the simulation is much faster than trying to simulate a complete dress with holes cut out, and because the simulation is faster, it makes you want to play around more and tweak the cloth properties exactly as you want them.

It's a lot easier that way because you get much faster feedback, it's like you started feeding your computer some steroids!

Sounds crazy, but trust me, it works

mmmmmmmm not 100% sure what your doing ;-) but sounds like fun

blender does have a "addon" (sewing springs) somewhat like MD but noway as easy to use

and you can do the cloth sims in blender , again not so elegantly as MD

{if you can do all the C++/python etc stuff the sky's the limit lol a addon that give me the stuff blenders cloth sim has I'd pay for and if I got MD's "stuff" in poser I'd kill rofl }

 

yeah yeah one day I'll stick a jack into the socket in back of me head  ;-)

Okay, si I went back into Blender and thneis time I came out with some I call the ELS dress. I got the idea from watching Bobby Brown's Every Little Step video. One of the girls was wearing a dress similar to this.

Anyway, so I did a rigid restrain on the rings in the dress, BUT if you check the screen shot you may have noticed the problem I seem to be having. If I restrain the rings on one side of the dress, it seems to bleed through to the other side. Any suggestions?

Is that "bleed through" happening because you are using a marquee selection tool ? If so, have you tried using the Add/ Remove buttons in the group editor, if you have material groups set up from Blender, you could remove>material>dress fabric. Or delete all and create the group by adding the hoop material.

Actually, yes, i was using the marquee tool, but I do have the dress set up so that there are two seperate materials for the rings and the dress. I will try that and see what happens. Thanks!