Question I would like as many answers to as possible: What are your expectations, and/or preferred methods for seeing buttons/rigid elements rigged in Poser outfits?

This has been a point of debate I've had to content with many times through the years with little to no actual "best" answer as to the preferences of customers. Currently working on some contract projects that will be available to the public eventually, and want to make sure I satisfy the best expectations. Thanks everyone!

Specifically, what I'm looking for feedback on is what methods people prefer in Poser for keeping rigid items like buttons following the cloth. In Daz Studio, I use "rigid follow nodes" that are essentially these nodes that allow an object to be linked to an actual polygon or group of polygons and it follows those no matter what. It's kinda awesome, really. But Poser has never had anything like that. so it's always been a matter of faking the appearance of those elements in some way, so I'm curious what methods of that folks prefer. Some of the tricks I've used in the past for it are incredibly time intensive and frankly, when it comes to judging in terms of return on investment for products, it's usually far from worth it. There are lots of things I've ran into like that after walking away from Poser for a few years. I used to be dedicated to it, but DS really upped the game with things like rigid follow, and the single weight map methodology that is so similar to how I work in Maya, so yeah.. having really gotten used to all that stuff,but now coming back to Poser for a contract, I'm just trying to get some feedback and best assess the route I should take.

You don't see buttons a lot on Poser dynamic clothes. In a lot of cases, texturing is good enough.

If you want actual, modeled buttons, that's what "Rigid-Decorated" is for. Been a long time since I've tried making dynamic clothes, but I seem to recall that the button mesh should not be actually attached to the dress, or weird stuff happens.

Use Rigid Decorated as the grouping for your button. Attach it to the mesh when you make your cloth and group it as such. It will follow the underlying cloth but not deform like a pocket would. The cloth room hasn't changed in forever. Works just like it did when you were on RDNA

In conformers, I use the new features of Poser - the Restore morph brush. Since you can force the brush to restrict by group/material it is easy to "unsmash" those rigid decorations. You could create a separate morph on the parameters pallet to allow the customer to do so at will.

Those are great, if you're working toward the cloth room, but that's not an option with the target of this project.

Could you not use something like the face chips in LaFemme? With a small weightmap around them they can then be adjusted for fit in the garment.

From what I see with those, it actually would still end up with the same technical problem as if I had the rigid elements as their own joints, particularly in the case of, say, buttons. The face chips can seem like a potential solution, but it appears that those still don't follow the underling joints, rather they control and move them. The difficulty of the rigid elements in clothing, again, specifically buttons, is that if they can follow a specific point on the mesh, that would be great, but that kind of thing has yet to be brought into Poser, leaving me with a situation where it looks like my options are: A. attempt to put on each button a morph for each rotation that corrects it; this is problematic though, in that 1. it actually ends up being 6 morphs to every joint that influences the area the button attaches to , made worse by 2. the fact that it's highly likely that as those morphs will actually compound and conflict with each other, creating even worse distortions than in the beginning B. rig the buttons with their own joints; once this is done, it is also possible to use dependencies and link their placements to the bending of joints to emulate the appearance of following the cloth, however a similar problem arises with the compounding of joint rotations/deformations as to the morph method C. have the buttons be separate, smart propped elements which will generally follow the joints, but could, and in many cases would need to be, adjusted by the user.

In the search for a solution that is completely hands off for the user, I've come up short on this time and again for nearly 20 years inside Poser, no matter what features are added, version after version. It's highly frustrating, and one of the things that made me almost entirely migrate to Daz Studio a few years back. To me, this is one of the single most glaring deficiencies in Poser, and I'm reaching out here to see if anyone has a preferred solution.

Note: in reply to thing about the restore morph brush... that only works if it is morphs causing the distortions. It's great for restoring elements back to their default state from within a bad morph, but the issue I have here isn't morph related.

Speaking purely as a user, I can't remember ever having problems with buttons. Maybe because buttons on conforming clothes are usually small, so if they deform, it's hard to see. The buttons on the jersey of a baseball uniform, for example. Larger items like clasps on cloaks are usually smart propped.

Anyways, buttons on conforming clothes are way down on the list of things that bug me about Poser.

sixus1 posted at 9:57AM Mon, 25 March 2019 - #4348761

Note: in reply to thing about the restore morph brush... that only works if it is morphs causing the distortions. It's great for restoring elements back to their default state from within a bad morph, but the issue I have here isn't morph related.

You can, however, use the Restore Brush to create a user controlled morph to restore pose or morph induced distortion. Something like "Uncrush buttons."

I mentioned the chips because I had some success with using the earlobe chips as constraint for earrings.

But easier soluton: If you give all the vertices of the button the same weight in the weight maps, would that not make them rotate as an undeformed body around the joint centre? Morphs are just linear translations and they could be copied from the 'anchor' vertex.

For behaviour like in dynamic cloth an object needs more than one vertex to follow or the direction would be undetermined. (vertex has 3 coordinates, object has 6 degrees of freedom). Even following the normal in addition would only give 2 more parameters and leave rotation of the button around the 'shaft' undetermined. You would need to maintain orientation with at least one other vertex, but better with a few more and average out. That could be doable with an addon, sort of 'sticky'objects server, Garment comes with an 'on-load' script that registers the buttons with a pointer to the vertices they connect to. The button needs not be a separate object but that could be more convenient to manage them.

maybe, one day, when the moon is in the seventh house and Jupiter aligns with Mars ...

If the user could select a vertex or polygon for an object to follow, then select an axis of that prop to always align to the normal of a polygon or vertex, then the object would follow rotationally quite well. Unfortunately, i don't think the folks who actually could implement something like this in the software are listening.

The single most important thing is that all are properly vertex grouped AND welded without having double vertex at the welds. In the past we have seen unwelded buttons, pockets, belts, and God knows what else.

Having a properly vertex grouped AND fully welded obj file, without double vertex, is what everybody is looking for.

All the rest can be solved within Poser if the obj file is OK.

sixus1 posted at 12:29PM Tue, 26 March 2019 - #4348761

In the search for a solution that is completely hands off for the user, I've come up short on this time and again for nearly 20 years inside Poser, no matter what features are added, version after version. It's highly frustrating, and one of the things that made me almost entirely migrate to Daz Studio a few years back. To me, this is one of the single most glaring deficiencies in Poser, and I'm reaching out here to see if anyone has a preferred solution.

I'm assuming what you are discussing here are buttons and other clothing details that get smooshed or buried in underlying clothing when the joints are rotated.

Aside from doing morphs to correct these issues, I wonder if they can at least partially be addressed in the bulge maps for the joint rotation. Once you determine which bulge map affects the selected part, you can use the Subtract or Add brush to adjust the position, and then the Smooth brush to smooth it out. The "Restrict To" option in the Vertex Weights palette lets you restrict the changes to a certain group or a certain material.

sixus1 posted at 6:42PM Tue, 26 March 2019 - #4348867

If the user could select a vertex or polygon for an object to follow, then select an axis of that prop to always align to the normal of a polygon or vertex, then the object would follow rotationally quite well. Unfortunately, i don't think the folks who actually could implement something like this in the software are listening.

People who can program this into the _software _can be found at the Smith Micro Poser forum. You could raise the question there.and @h-elwood-gililand.

Your best chances are in a script or add-on. I have been wanting the same for a long long time. Thank you for bringing his up again. I gave it some thought and see some light at the end of the tunnel.

For buttons specifically, I've had success with just painting the entire button the exact same weight. I haven't used it extensively but where I have the button moves with the underlying mesh but does not deform. Not sure if this would work in all situations. And I could see larger buttons becoming more problematic