Part 2: Creating a Native LF Conversion

Let’s face it: The dress DEV in Poser 11.2 for La Femme is useless for rigging dresses and skirts because it doesn’t have skirt handles. There is a DEV equivalent that does: Erogenesis’ $5.00 Project Evolution Content Support Kit (Beta) available at CGBytes, which includes the Evolution Dress Mannequin. I started out converting clothing and shoes for Pauline and Paul, who had almost nothing available commercially, but there were no native dress donor rigs that had sleeves or long skirts. (You can conform V4 clothing to Pauline and use it with minor adjustments, just like La Femme.) When Evolution and her mannequins appeared, I realized she was the Rosetta Stone for clothing conversion. Her zero pose is close enough to G3F’s that with the morph brush, you can adapt any obj clothing to fit, AND a little scaling makes Genesis 3 shoes line up with her zero pose. Once something is converted for Evolution, you can pose it to match the zero pose of any other figure. I have a freebie conversion of the mannequin for Pauline.

But wait: there’s more! Once LF came along, I discovered by experimentation that you can conform Evolution’s clothing created with the dress mannequin to LF and copy the joint zones, and get pretty darn close. There can some crushing around the waist, which requires flattening and smoothing with the morph brush, and the abdomen tends to poke through when bent forward. So I created standard, reusable smoothing and tummy morphs that I can copy from outfit to outfit. Then I hit upon using the PE MFD as as the donor rig in the setup room, where you transfer the rigging (and morphs if you like) to an obj. In fact, the version I created doing a step-by-step for this tutorial is better than the first one I made (perhaps because I scaled it to 98 percent on the Y axis) and seems to have eliminated the minor crushing around the waist.

So, what does this mean for La Femme?

9. First you need to obtain the dress mannequin and load it in Poser. That’s all you need; you don’t need Evolution herself. However, if you want to convert for Evolution too, load her first and morph brush the outfit directly to her body so it will fit well. Then load the mannequin for use in the fitting room. [Image 9]

10. Add MFD to the scene. [Image 10]

11. Select MFD Body and set y scale to 98, and shift the garment on the y axis to line up, and then shift it slightly back on the z axis. [Image 11]

12. Pose the collars, shoulders, and forearms to fit. [Image 12]

13. Hide the skirt handles. Enter the fitting room and create a new session. Select MFD as the object (do not zero) and the mannequin as the goal (zero). I always use the rigid features choice on the pulldown menu. Run the fit routine for 40 cycles. [Image 13]

14.Hit Create Figure. The name doesn’t matter, and V4_MFD 1 is fine. Select auto group and deselect transfer morphs. (Clothes for Evolution require two runs through the fitting room because if you select the body handles when running auto group, it tears holes in the mesh.) Select the body parts you are familiar with from neck to forearms and the thighs, plus the skirt controls, but NOT the body handles such as the breasts and glutes. Click OK, then after the new figure is created, SAVE. (The Beta occasionally deforms, and after you return to the pose room, you may have to close the scene and reopen it after you are done in the fitting room.) [Image 14]

15. Start a new session, and use the figure you just created as the object and the mannequin as the goal. Do not fit it. Create a new figure (I’d name it MFD PE) and make sure that auto group is deselected. You have to transfer the morphs because they include JCM data that must be there for the conversion to LF to work. (You could use trial and error to figure out the minimum ones necessary, but the other morphs are useful as adjuncts to MFD’s own morphs, such as shoulders up.) Create a new figure, using all the parts you used before plus the control handles for glutes, biceps, breasts, belly, and buttocks. These handles will let you adjust the garment parts on LF. Click OK. SAVE before returning to the pose room. [Image 15]

16. Just to declutter, I’d make the two MFDs other than MFD PE invisible. Select MFD PE. Copy all morphs from V4-MFD. Save the garment in the Character library. At least on my Mac, you have to save it twice for an icon to appear. This is the garment you will conform to La Femme.