Using the Converted Morphing Fantasy Dress as a Donor Rig in the Setup Room

You can convert almost any dress to La Femme (LF) using the setup room and the Morphing Fantasy Dress (MFD LF) that you created in my first tutorial. The fitting room rigs an obj. You can convert V4 or Dawn clothes, but you can also convert the latest clothing for DAZ’s Genesis 3 and 8 characters. Given the DAZ strategy of planned obsolescence, you can watch the sales and pick up some great G3F gowns and dresses for peanuts; G8F outfits except sleeveless dresses require some pre-posing to match the standard T-pose before exporting. To use those, you buy them and install them the DAZ 3D Library for in DAZ Studio (DS). If you purchase from DAZ, use the simple Install Manager. If you buy from Renderosity or another vendor, I prefer to manually install the files in the proper library folders. Load the garment, or the pieces of the outfit, one by one in DS; apply 3Delight materials if available (iray MATs work, but they don’t look great, and you will probably want to apply Poser native materials later); and export to a folder as an obj.

Be forewarned: Whether you start with a cr2 or an obj and pre-fit it to La Femme before sending it to the setup room, you will want to export an obj of whatever you do using built-in morphs or the morph brush (save as DressName LF or something similar). File menu/Export/Wavefront OBJ; select weld body part seams and include body part names. Reimport it and position it so that it perfectly fits LF. You do this because Poser will nullify all morphs when it creates the obj it uses in the Setup room.

Let’s convert a long sleeveless or short sleeve dress in five minutes!

1. Load La Femme and set preview subd to zero. Load a dress obj. Here I will use Polyantha Rose for Genesis 8 Female. It is sleeveless, so it requires no pre-posing in DS before being exported as an obj. It demonstrates that the MFD donor rig can handle more form fitting long skirt areas and a train without modification. Line the dress up with LF; in this case, I turned the z scale up a bit. Select LF Body and on the Properties tab, change Subdivision Levels Preview to zero (0). [Image 1]

2. The five minutes will depend on how handy you are with the morph brush! Select the dress obj, open the morph brush, and create a new morph, which I will call LF Fit. Pick La Femme as the goal. Use the tighten and loosen fit settings (sometimes flatten and smooth come in handy, too, like if a butt crease appears) to make the dress fit LF on one side and then mirror it to the other. Polyantha Rose is an asymmetrical mesh, so I had to do extra work on the right side. [Image 2]

3. When you’re happy, export the modified dress obj as a Wavefront OBJ, which I will call Polyantha Dress LF. Make the obj that you morphed invisible, Import the obj you just created, and position it to fit LF. SAVE. For ease of experience, find your MFD LF dress in the character library. With your new obj selected, click on the Setup tab. Accept the dialogue box. Click on the library icon in the far upper right. Double click on MFD LF. Auto group and copy the morphs. The rigging for the dress will appear. [Image 3]

4. Click the Pose tab. Poser may spend a couple of minutes calculating everything and then return you to the Pose room. SAVE. Your new obj is gone, replaced by a rigged dress with skirt controls and morphs. It will now be called MFD LF. Select the dress Body and click on the Properties tab. Click the name and put the one you want. I use a lot of donors, so I usually leave a short reference to the donor rig at the end of the name (e.g., MFD) so I remember what I did. You are all done! Was it five minutes? [Image 4]

I included thighs in the MFD rig because my experience showed they are really helpful when adjusting the skirt to a sitting position. (You have the sitting morphs, the thighs, and the skirt handles to play with.) There is, therefore, a trick to posing the dress to match LF’s pose. If you use a walking pose, for example, the thighs will distort the mesh. Use the dress’s thighs to offset LF’s thigh movement, which smooths the mesh, then use the skirt handles and morphs to pose the dress. You can nudge things using the thighs. In the image above, the thighs offset the leg poses, the hem length morph accommodates LF’s high heels, and a morph lifts the front hem to show the toe of a shoe. She’s wearing my freebie base skin makeup.