Vendors haven’t (yet?) come through with native dresses and skirts for La Femme with skirt rigging and/or movement morphs to do the job. Now that most users have Poser Pro 11, I offer this tutorial on converting V4 dresses to La Femme while retaining the rigging and morphs. I will use the Morphing Fantasy Dress (MFD) from DAZ, which is your best choice for first conversion because it has skirt controls and beaucoup morphs that you can copy to other items you convert (for example, DAZ clothing for G3F or G8F that you export as objs from DS). MFD’s morphs include, for example, sitting morphs and a hem length morph that lets a garment work with high heels. The hem morphs also work with a small train. The V4 adjustment morphs (e.g., hip, forearm, breast) generally work fine with LF. And you always have the morph brush.

So why do it this way? This is a work-around. If you convert in the fitting room, you lose the rigging. That’s fine for pants, shirts, shoes, etc., but losing skirt controls is a nuisance. Let it be said, you can convert in the fitting room auto-grouping to thighs and shins and still copy all the movement and adjustment morphs from MFD, and that might be good enough for you. That is a simpler work-around and requires no explanation. In part 2, I will explain how to create a version of MFD that you can use as a donor rig for anything else you convert in the setup room. That requires a good bit of work up front but pays huge dividends down the road.

Let’s convert!

1. Load La Femme (LF). [Image 1]

1. Conform V4 MFD to LF. [Image 2]

1. Select MFD and on the Figure menu, select copy joint zones from. Select LF as your source. [Image 3]

1. Select MFD’s body part Hip and move it back with the Z dial. [Image 4]

1. Now pose the abdomen, chest, collars, shoulders, and forearms to match LF as much as possible. Create a folder in your Pose library (I have one called La Femme Clothing with subfolders for each converted item) and save a pose of MFD (something like V4 MFD LF Jt Zones, which will remind you to copy the joint zones in future before you pose a garment). I will release a freebie with a pose for MFD, but you should really spend the time to do it yourself, because therein lies understanding of what’s going on. [Image 5]

1. Select La Femme’s body and click on the Properties tab. Under Subdivision Levels, set preview to zero. This will make the morph brush happy. Select MFD and click the morph brush icon (hand pointing finger, under editing tools). Create a new morph, which I will call LF Fit. Pick La Femme as the goal. You will be using the tighten and loosen fit settings under actions. For most work, I use a radius in the mid-300s and a magnitude around 1100. Loosen (where bare skin is visible) and tighten (I did some around the bosom and torso) on one side (I did the left in the image) until you are happy. The freebie will contain an LF Fit morph INJ for MFD, but you really should become familiar with the morph brush yourself. It’s one of Poser’s strongest features. [Image 6]

1. Pull down the mirror menu and select left to right. Fix up any spots where the mirrored mesh doesn’t quite do the job. [Image 7]

1. Select the skirt grab handles one by one and turn them invisible in the Properties tab (Don’t miss the one directly underneath). You can control them from the body parts menu. Create a folder in your Character library and save the MFD. When you conform it anew, you will need to apply the pose you saved, and set the LF Fit morph to one (1) in the MFD body parameters tab. This is a final posed outcome image. I used the left skirt handle to cover the leg, and hip adjustment morph to fix a little poke-through. I could try using the morph brush to modify the LF Fit morph to smooth out the elbow (elbows and knees are the most likely places to see small issues when posing), or I could quickly do a fix with the morph brush. I won’t tinker further, because I use the system covered in the next section and I won’t personally use this again. [Image 8]

The pose for MFD should get other V4 dresses close to what you need to convert them for LF. You can try copying the LF Fit morph from your MFD, but I’d recommend recreating an LF Fit morph unique to every garment. For example, you can make the morph brush radius small to treat raised surface details differently, like buttons, that don’t exist on MFD.

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?

1. 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]

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

1. 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]

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

1. 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]

1. 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]

1. 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.

1. Open a scene with La Femme. You will be using the morph brush, so change her preview subd to zero (0). Conform MFD PE to LF. Select MFD PE and copy joint zones from LF. We will be creating a new LF Fit morph, but you already now have a rigged MFD that can be a donor without modification for sleeveless or short-sleeve gowns. [Image 17] It can rig long dresses with long sleeves with small adjustments to the forearms in the setup room and the need to pose the forearms on the converted dress (a small sacrifice! See the next tutorial on using MFD LF as a donor rig in the Setup room, which also tackles shorter skirts.). [Image 17]

1. Use the morph brush on one side to loosen (mainly backside) and tighten (bosom, neck, abdomen) MFD. [Note: If you use the INJ morph mentioned below, you don’t have to do this yourself.] The sleeves will not be not properly aligned when conformed, however. You can pose the sleeves—a simple enough procedure that you don’t need to save a pose file to use every time. I live with that on some of my early conversions for Pauline before I discovered the Evolution Rosetta Stone. When finished with one side, mirror the morphs to the other and clean up any little problems. I pushed the morph brush hard to move the sleeves on MFD to match LF, and my freebie for this tutorial includes an INJ morph for my LF. [Image 18]

1. Select MFD’s body. Go to the Properties tab, click on the name, and change it to MFD LF. Add the V4 MFD to the scene. Select MFD LF and copy morphs from the V4 version. Delete the V4 dress. Save your new garment as an LF clothing item. When you conform it in future, you will have to set the LF Fit morph on the Body parameters tab to 1.

2. Here is La Femme using pose 10 of Tempting La Femme. There’s some real hip twist in the pose, which requires playing with the thighs and skirt controls. There was some poke-through on the forearms and a tiny bit on the shoulder. I moved the MFD forearms slightly on the Z axis and used the dress’s morphs to eliminate the poke-through. [Image 20.]

I’m really glad I did this tutorial because my new version, MFD LF 2.0, is better than the first iteration. The crushing is gone, and it occurs to me that making LF’s abdomen invisible would also eliminate the poke-through when bending. Duh.

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]

1. 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]

1. 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]

1. 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.

Let’s convert a shorter dress with sleeves!

This is not a double click solution. You have to suck it up and do some really easy fiddling with the rig in the Setup room after you apply it to your obj. I am going to use Loving You for G3F.

1. Load La Femme. Remember to change the preview subd to zero. Load your obj. Fortunately, G3F’s zero arms pose isn’t that far from LF’s as far as the elbow, and Loving You needs very little morph brush work using the loosen and tighten settings. Two clicks of X Rotate gets the garment ready for morphing. With the mesh already closely matching LF down to the elbows, don’t do morph brush work on the forearms. We’re going to let rigging and minor posing see to the forearms. [Image 5]

1. As above, export a new obj, in this case Loving You LF. Reimport and position the obj. With it selected, click the Setup tab. Follow the procedure above to inject the rigging and morphs into the dress. [Image 6]

1. When you work in the Setup room, only use the front, right, left, back, top, and bottom cameras so that when you adjust bones, they only move along x, y, and z axes. Pick Display menu, Camera View, From Top. Click the left forearm bone. Close the library so you can see the control dials. Bend the forearm back until it aligns with the dress. Do the exact same on the right. (There is also a rigging symmetry selection on the figure menu if you want to use that). [Image 7]

1. Loving You, though, has a knee-length, form fitting skirt, and It’s necessary to adapt the skirt handles to the mesh. They need to be shorter and coincide with the lines of the skirt. Select a bone (e.g., Left Control, looking from the front camera) by clicking on it or choosing it in the body parts menu and then move the cursor to the tip until it turns into a circle with a dot in the middle. Click and drag the tip of the bone to a new position. I repeat: Do it ONLY using the front, left, right, and rear cameras, never the main camera. You can drag the tip laterally and also make the bone longer or shorter. Use the left or right view to adjust the front and back controls. Here is the rigging with the skirt controls repositioned. [Images 8 and 9]

1. You are done and can click the Pose tab and conform your new dress. The forearms will not align properly. Pose the dress forearms by bending them to fit. That’s the only kink in a dress with sleeves! [Image 10] You can now use the new dress as the donor for similar dresses in the future.

1. Just FYI. I tried converting Belle dress for G3F, which has a wide flouncy skirt. Even with the skirt handles aligned to it, the auto-group process did not work right, so there does appear to be an upper limit to skirt size that will take MFD LF as a donor rig.

I have uploaded the freebie.

Rob, just an FYI if you own the DC Body Kit morphs or Blackhearted Femme Fatale morphs, they both come with 2 donor kits already. A long skirt and pants to the toes.

Since they are Hi Res, they will copy over the rigging and morphs much more efficiently and cleanly.

Also, keep in mind in weight map rigging, separate ghost bones are no longer necessary. A properly rigged weight mapped skirt will follow the pose all the way to the floor. You can move the thigh and shin bones as if they were ghost bones.

This pose is done with a properly rigged WM skirt and not simmed in the cloth room

However, no matter what mesh you are using a long skirt in a seated position will always look better and fall more naturally by simming the hip in the cloth room.

Weight mapped skirts always look wrong to me, they cling to the leg too much. Ghost bones are far better IMO

Glitterati3D posted at 9:07AM Mon, 09 December 2019 - #4372809

Rob, just an FYI if you own the DC Body Kit morphs or Blackhearted Femme Fatale morphs, they both come with 2 donor kits already. A long skirt and pants to the toes.

Since they are Hi Res, they will copy over the rigging and morphs much more efficiently and cleanly.

Also, keep in mind in weight map rigging, separate ghost bones are no longer necessary. A properly rigged weight mapped skirt will follow the pose all the way to the floor. You can move the thigh and shin bones as if they were ghost bones.

This pose is done with a properly rigged WM skirt and not simmed in the cloth room

However, no matter what mesh you are using a long skirt in a seated position will always look better and fall more naturally by simming the hip in the cloth room.

With skirt handles, that dress would drape, not bend like pants. I personally don’t use dynamics. This is for other users who don’t, either.

RobZhena posted at 10:11AM Mon, 09 December 2019 - #4372814

Glitterati3D posted at 9:07AM Mon, 09 December 2019 - #4372809

Rob, just an FYI if you own the DC Body Kit morphs or Blackhearted Femme Fatale morphs, they both come with 2 donor kits already. A long skirt and pants to the toes.

Since they are Hi Res, they will copy over the rigging and morphs much more efficiently and cleanly.

Also, keep in mind in weight map rigging, separate ghost bones are no longer necessary. A properly rigged weight mapped skirt will follow the pose all the way to the floor. You can move the thigh and shin bones as if they were ghost bones.

This pose is done with a properly rigged WM skirt and not simmed in the cloth room

However, no matter what mesh you are using a long skirt in a seated position will always look better and fall more naturally by simming the hip in the cloth room.

With skirt handles, that dress would drape, not bend like pants. I personally don’t use dynamics. This is for other users who don’t, either.

Excuse me, but the thigh and shins in that skirt ARE ghost bones.

DreaminGirl posted at 10:21AM Mon, 09 December 2019 - #4372810

Weight mapped skirts always look wrong to me, they cling to the leg too much. Ghost bones are far better IMO

First, properly rigged the thighs AND shins AND feet, if included ARE GHOST BONES in a weight map skirt.

Just because we've done something one way, for one 15 yr. old model does not mean we have to perpetuate that method. Advances in Poser have given us BETTER ways to accomplish the same task while giving the customer added benefits.

In a properly weight mapped skirt, the thigh and shin ghost bones will follow the pose. There's no reason to faff around with separate bones to pose the skirt AFTER you've posed the figure. Proper weight mapping will do that for you.

Now, please, show me the cling in ANY of these products in the store. These are weight mapped ghost bones that will follow the pose of the figure. This enables our customers to load, pose, render. And those who CHOOSE to use the cloth room also have the ability.

@Glitterati

Those images just prove my point, the skirts follow the legs in unnatural ways, including uneven stretching. They all look awful. Ever seen a REAL skirt hover above the leg like that?

DreaminGirl posted at 10:39AM Mon, 09 December 2019 - #4372822

@Glitterati

Those images just prove my point, the skirts follow the legs in unnatural ways, including uneven stretching. They all look awful. Ever seen a REAL skirt hover above the leg like that?

Oh, so now you WANT it to cling? OK. Whatever.

It's still a ghost bone and you can move it into whatever position you prefer.

If you want added ghost bones that require unnecessary rigging, I hope you're prepared to pay the price for the products that contain all that rigging.

'Modern' rigged skirts behave like pants, not skirts, which is why old-style rigging is FAR superior IMO. I have no problem paying for quality products.

Anyway, back to the topic: Those are some good tutorials there, Rob!

Oh, yeah, I forgot how "natural" ghost bones on the MFD moved, and no texture stretching in even the simplest of poses. Bwahahahahahahahahahaha

Honestly I prefer a mix of both. Have the legs behave as ghost bones and have some handles for fine tuning.

And, of course, to please both preferences

This tutorial would have come extremely handy when I ported Lolita Dress from V4 to La Femme. I'll keep this in mind if I ever wanna port Perfume Alpha. Thank you!

When I ported Lolita Dress, I had to completely remake the skirt handle bones from scratch, because I was adding LaFemme's skeleton to it from Setup Room and then it replaces everything.

What does this method do with the geometry/mesh group for the extra waist bone that La Femme has compared to V4, by the way?

And here, proof for my preference for having both, here's one of Lolita Dress' promos

Lolita Suprema definitely works better with handles, as it's supposed to look rather rigid.

Any plans to port over Andraste?

Edit: I realize I said in an earlier post 'ghost bones' when what I meant was 'handles'

ghost bones/handles = same thing, rigged the same way

Pretty amazing work! Especially for those of us who want to G3F stuff into Poser. I know this tutorial is for LaFemme but I'm hoping it will work other characters as well. One question. Are those workboots for Lafemme a native item? I don't remember seeing them in the marketplace.

Thanks for the hardwork, Rob. I know making tuts are their own reward but a Thank You is a feel good too!

A note on adding materials to G3F or G8F in DS before exporting: When you go to the Material room and click browse for a material zone, it takes you to the correct folder in your DAZ 3D Library to find other provided textures. Some garments have so many material zones, however, that I just apply each pre-set and export new obj. I import it into Poser and use MAT Writer Panel 2014 to save each in a Material library folder. If you are converting for several figures (I usually do --now--LF, PE, Pauline, G2F, and sometimes Dawn once I have a posable cr2 and the process is super fast), I recommend picking one figure to consolidate all the MAT folders. I arbitrarily store them all under G2F clothing.

quietrob posted at 3:14PM Mon, 09 December 2019 - #4372855

Pretty amazing work! Especially for those of us who want to G3F stuff into Poser. I know this tutorial is for LaFemme but I'm hoping it will work other characters as well. One question. Are those workboots for Lafemme a native item? I don't remember seeing them in the marketplace.

Thanks for the hardwork, Rob. I know making tuts are their own reward but a Thank You is a feel good too!

Are you talking about these boots?

If so, they are part of the Everyday Denim set for La Femme: https://www.renderosity.com/mod/bcs/everyday-denim-for-la-femme/138176/

Afrodite-Ohki posted at 4:54PM Mon, 09 December 2019 - #4372842

When I ported Lolita Dress, I had to completely remake the skirt handle bones from scratch, because I was adding LaFemme's skeleton to it from Setup Room and then it replaces everything.

What does this method do with the geometry/mesh group for the extra waist bone that La Femme has compared to V4, by the way?

And here, proof for my preference for having both, here's one of Lolita Dress' promos

Haha! I tried to hack this dress to use as a donor, but when I reoriented the bones in the Setup room, it just didn’t work. Your design is unique. I haven’t noticed an extra bone causing issues, unless that’s why I get tummy poke-through when LF bends.

DreaminGirl posted at 7:05PM Mon, 09 December 2019 - #4372847

Lolita Suprema definitely works better with handles, as it's supposed to look rather rigid.

Any plans to port over Andraste?

Edit: I realize I said in an earlier post 'ghost bones' when what I meant was 'handles'

Oooh that's a hard one. I've considered, and still am considering - but those gloves with fingers, and it's so high-poly it kinda hurts me now that I know better

RobZhena posted at 7:09PM Mon, 09 December 2019 - #4372884

Haha! I tried to hack this dress to use as a donor, but when I reoriented the bones in the Setup room, it just didn’t work. Your design is unique. I haven’t noticed an extra bone causing issues, unless that’s why I get tummy poke-through when LF bends.

xD The skirt itself is all hip group, and then there's the skirt handle that's a child to the hip (along with the thighs), and then all other handles are children to the skirt handle.

But yeah if there's poke-through in the tummy that's probably because of this. V4 has Hips-Abdomen-Chest, La Femme has Hips-Waist-Abdomen-Chest.

Glitterati3D posted at 2:31PM Mon, 09 December 2019 - #4372869

quietrob posted at 3:14PM Mon, 09 December 2019 - #4372855

Pretty amazing work! Especially for those of us who want to G3F stuff into Poser. I know this tutorial is for LaFemme but I'm hoping it will work other characters as well. One question. Are those workboots for Lafemme a native item? I don't remember seeing them in the marketplace.

Thanks for the hardwork, Rob. I know making tuts are their own reward but a Thank You is a feel good too!

Are you talking about these boots?

If so, they are part of the Everyday Denim set for La Femme: https://www.renderosity.com/mod/bcs/everyday-denim-for-la-femme/138176/

That's exactly the pair I meant. Thanks for the clue. I now return you to your thread and will retreat to the shadows.

Wow ... this is wonderful! thank you.

@Glitterati3D's Faire Maiden, skirt rigged with MFD LF donor, posed with skirt control handles, and hem draped with MFD morph.

This needs to be stickied

RobZhena posted at 8:22PM Wed, 11 December 2019 - #4372981

@Glitterati3D's Faire Maiden, skirt rigged with MFD LF donor, posed with skirt control handles, and hem draped with MFD morph.

As opposed to what you get when you purchase the properly weight mapped, rigged skirt with ghost bones/handles as it is in the store. And, I didn't even have to hide her shin, leaving her dismembered foot on the day bed like a grotesque prop!

This image was produced by using load, pose, render instead of fighting with a cone that behaves like my dog's ecollar after surgery.

Sorry, but that skirt looks really bad, it bends with the leg in a very unnatural way. Ever seen a real skirt behave like that? It looks more like pants to me. But you are right, skirts of this kind are better simmed.

DreaminGirl posted at 9:57PM Wed, 11 December 2019 - #4373058

Sorry, but that skirt looks really bad, it bends with the leg in a very unnatural way. Ever seen a real skirt behave like that? It looks more like pants to me. But you are right, skirts of this kind are better simmed.

To each his own, but I would suggest you might want to visit google and find some images of people walking.

I encountered a problem with a dress conversion using the buttocks handle from the MFD LF donor. it was capturing a few verts on the front during auto-grouping. Re-rigging it in the Setup room and deselecting that handle fixed it. Something to try if you encounter a little problem.

Rigging a Coat for La Femme

I’m going to rig Deacon215’s dForce fur coat for G8F (at Renderosity: https://www.renderosity.com/mod/bcs/dforce-fur-coat-for-genesis-8-female/139892/) to work with La Femme (LF). Rest assured that the fur coat consists of genetically engineered, manufactured faux furs; no animals were harmed during this process, nor is this intended to encourage people to wear murdered animals. I’m starting from scratch with a version for Evolution because I don’t need the majority of morphs from the Morphing Fantasy Dress (MFD).

1. As usual, load the coat in DAZ Studio. It has what I assume to be a yellow LIE layer for the materials. Click it and delete it. The coat doesn’t look like much at this point, but we’ll apply materials to it later. Click each shoulder and pose the coat to a T position. The mesh is lousy for posing and created big bumps on the sleeve bottoms near the armpits. Don’t worry. Those will meet their match at the hands of the morph brush. Export an obj.

2. Load the PE beta dress mannequin in Poser, import the coat, position it, and go to the Material room with the obj selected. The coat material should already be selected. Click the browse button and find Deacon215’s folder in the DAZ 3D Library textures folder and select FurCoat.jpg, and apply it. I added it to the Highlight, too. Click the Bump Map box, browse, and load FurCoat_B.jpg. Back to the Pose room. SAVE.

3. Go to work with the morph brush. I attacked those ugly lumps with the flatten and smooth tools at 5000 magnitude, and tidied up with the loosen tool. The mesh is asymmetrical, so I had to do more work after I fixed the left side and mirrored it. [Image 1]

1. Go to the Fitting room. Select the coat prop as the object (don’t zero) and the mannequin as the goal (zero). I always use the rigid features setting on the pulldown menu. You should have already fitted the obj to the mannequin, so create a new figure. Follow the procedure described in my earlier post to rig the coat and transfer the morphs from the mannequin. In this case, I don’t transfer the thighs because I won’t need them for subtle adjustments, like a gown, so just the skirt control handles and the upper body to the neck and forearms. Also, I notice after the first run through the fitting room that I didn’t get the T-pose perfectly when I exported the coat obj from DS, so now that I have body parts in the sleeve, I adjust the sleeve to center the arm and attack the armpit bumps again with the morph brush. I don’t need to auto group again, so I do the second run (do NOT zero the coat because of changes) to add the body handles. Name the final version Fur Coat PE or something similar. [Images 2 and 3]

1. Now find a coat that has open and close morphs. I used the ReiverTCoat for V4. Load it and copy all the morphs to your new coat. I will also load V4_MFD and copy the sitting and kneeling morphs, ‘cause La Femme gotta sit sometime! Save it in your Character library as Fur Coat PE or something similar. This is the coat you will conform to LF. [Image 4].

1. Open a scene with La Femme. Set her subd preview to zero. Conform the coat to LF and copy joint zones from. [Image 5]

1. Use the morph brush to create a new morph, LF Fit. Use the loosen tool to make the dress fit. You will still be able to pose the sleeve forearms to get the arm centered if you want when you pose LF. Rename the coat to Fur Coat LF or something similar and save it to your library. Done! [Image 6]

1. I use MAT Writer Panel 2014 to save a material setting because Deacon215 provides two shades of fur. Just go to the Material room choose the other jpeg in the texture folder, as you did above. [Image 7]

1. The here is a final version. I ran the coat through EZSkin 3 and applied the hair shader. The dress is Elegant for G3F (available at Renderosity: https://www.renderosity.com/mod/bcs/?ViewProduct=113355) rigged with the MFD LF donor and with a silk material from Atenais. The makeup and shoes are freebies by me. [Image 8]

Convert a dynamic dress

A lot of the clothing for La Femme is dynamic, so what if you want to convert it to conforming? I’ll use karanta's Ann dress for PE because I already bought it to convert to conforming.

1. Load La Femme and set her preview subd to zero in the properties tab. Load a dynamic dress prop. Some will load parented to LF, so select the prop and Object menu>Change Parent>Universe. [Image 1]

1. Follow the procedures above to fit the garment to LF with the morph brush, export an obj such as Ann Dress LF.obj, hide the prop, import the new obj, and match it to LF. [Image 2]

1. Find MFD LF in your Character library so you’re ready for the setup room. Go to the Setup room and use MFD as the donor rig. This time, deselect the center, left, and right skirt handles so the mesh will auto-group the skirt to front and back panels. [Image 3]

1. I want the front and back skirt handles to affect the mesh higher than usual because of the long slit, so using the right view camera, shift the front and back skirt handles up and reposition the tips to match the skirt. [Image 4]

1. Back to the Pose room, conform Ann dress to LF and rename it Ann Dress MFD in the properties panel. Save your new dress. [Image 5]

1. We have hacked the original PE dress mannequin to its limits, and at least for me, I got a weird protrusion when bending the back panel. [Image 6] Depending on the angle, that might not matter. Fortunately, however, the MFD morphs let you achieve the same effect without using the handle. [Image 7]

There are limits on what dynamic dresses you can convert. I converted karanta's Tori dress for La Femme, for example, and the busy geometry (folds in the skirt) did not play well with auto-group.

Very cool! Thanks for this presentation.

Hi Rob,

please don't try to change my dynamic clothes into conforming clothes. You will seldom get an acceptable result, because they are not modelled to be cut into bodyparts.

If I would make conforming clothes I would make clothes with optimized geometry to cut them in peaces and they would have at least 95% quad polygons. All my new clothes have delaunay triangulation which is nice for dynamic, but usually works bad for conforming clothes.

karanta posted at 3:39PM Wed, 22 January 2020 - #4377436

Hi Rob,

please don't try to change my dynamic clothes into conforming clothes. You will seldom get an acceptable result, because they are not modelled to be cut into bodyparts.

If I would make conforming clothes I would make clothes with optimized geometry to cut them in peaces and they would have at least 95% quad polygons. All my new clothes have delaunay triangulation which is nice for dynamic, but usually works bad for conforming clothes.

Ah, but conversion works fine with many of your products. It's good to know about the design change in your newer products, though sadly that means I won't buy any of them because I never use dynamics. Cheers!

I figured out the strange protrusion mentioned above. Solution: Do not transfer the center skirt handle.

There's a fair amount of Genesis 3 clothing in the clearance sale. Planned obcelecense!

I picked up a fair amount this weekend. xtrart-3d has some good products in the Clearance.

I finally had time to test drive Glitterati3D's wonderful multipurpose gown (MPG). I found that if I copied the V4 MFD morphs to it (they generally play well the mesh), I got something close to the degree of control over skirt movement that the PE beta mannequin morph provides. The big advantage is that it is truly native to La Femme (LF). Let's say LF wants to sit with her legs crossed. I could not get the stock dress to completely work with the pose, but with the MFD morphs, I had a lot of options to play with. Here are the results.

Stock MPG:

Using transferred MFD skirt morphs:

I'll try reconverting some gowns using MPG with MFD morphs as the donor.

Converting Rhiannon’s Waterfall Duster to La Femme

On Black Friday sale, Rhiannon’s Waterfall Duster looks like a good candidate for conversion. None of my character closets have something exactly like it. I’m going to use the fur coat I created in an earlier Tutorial because I added opening morphs to it. G8F outfits except sleeveless dresses require some pre-posing to match the standard T-pose before exporting. Buy and install the product the DAZ 3D Library for in DAZ Studio (DS). Load the garment in DS; unfortunately, only iray MATS are available. Apply one so you will link back to that folder when you click Browse in the Material Room. 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 Waterfall Duster in five minutes!

1. Load La Femme. Select LF Body and on the Properties tab, change Subdivision Levels Preview to zero (0). Load a dress obj. Import the obj you exported from DS. Position the garment so thet you will be able to fix all poke through easily with the morph brush. I turned the x scale down to 94.

1. The five minutes will depend on how handy you are with the morph brush! Select the duster 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.

1. When you’re happy, export the modified duster obj as a Wavefront OBJ, which I will call Waterfall Duster 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 fur coat 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 the fur coat. Auto group and copy the morphs. I want to force autogroup to attach all the verts to the left, right, and back skirt controls, so I deselect the front and center controls. The rigging for the dress will appear.

1. 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 Fur Coat. 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 so I remember what I did. You are all done! Was it five minutes?

Here is the conformed duster with the left side open.

Even though I picked a material in DS, all I got with the obj was the black sheen. So I go to the Material Room. Thankfully, the duster has only one material zone, Robe. I start with a transparency map. Click browse, I go to the Textures folder in my DAZ 3D Library, find Rhiannon/Waterfall, and add the 01 trans map. I then add the 01 bump map and the 01 specular texture. Now even the iray materials look OK. I use MAT Writer 2014 to save as a material setting for the garment.

Repeat that process for all the options.

Here is Cynthia La Femme wearing the Waterfall Duster.

Once you have all your material settings, just change the diffuse color after applying to one you want.

I was just checking this out today, and I realized that at no point did I mention that if you are converting something that can use LF's MFD or another LF donor more or less exactly, you can simply load the donor into your scene and use the fitting room, with your un-zeroed obj as the object and your zeroed donor as the goal. There is some flexibility here. For example, if you want a garment with hanging front and back panels to auto group only to the front and back skirt controls, uncheck the center, left, and right skirt handles when you create the new figure. If there is a really long train, you can try bending the rear control on MFD backward to overlap and then use MFD as the goal un-zeroed. You can copy the morphs in the fitting room or after the garment is rigged.

By the way, Susie's Rags has an excellent LF native donor rig for skirts down to knee length.

I also realized that these tutorials apply to Poser 11 Pro, as I understand that one of the "improvements" in Poser 12 is the elimination of the simple tab for adding new textures to clothing. You now have to screw around with nodes.

Interesting. Also pretty funny all of the passive aggressive stuff in between the lines lol... seems to be part and parcel on the forum, or what's left of it. Mostly talking to yourself in an empty room saying ewwww look at me while starchy spocks stare in silence lol. Anyway, I digress... that's an incredible amount of work for dresses. Nothing but respect for Poser clothing artists to be sure. I just buy stuff that works out of the box, or if needs must use dynamic which really seems to be the best way to handle dresses. I've had some pretty good results with crossdresser for La Femme, at least good enough to be easily fixed either in Poser or externally. Where would us poor marginalized poser artists be without our few remaining seamstresses to garb our beleaguered dolls. Simple clothing modeling doesn't seem that difficult, y'know tshirts and panties (in fact its easy) but when you get into all the ruffles and zippers and curlicues and seams and... well that's quite an art. Ditto with the texturing.

Have you ever considered making clothing RobZhena? And also thank you for the elaborate tutorial, it's threads like this that are the gems of usefulness buried in the advanced search here. Forgive me if you do in fact make clothing, I didn't check.

You know what La Femme could use? Some old school slavic or "gypsy" attire, especially like the really elaborate rag dresses with all the colored strips of lace and gauze. I don't think there's even much of that for V4...

Russian headdresses too, though I see some really beautiful things for Genesis in that vein.

primorge posted at 3:52AM Mon, 02 August 2021 - #4424364

You know what La Femme could use? Some old school slavic or "gypsy" attire, especially like the really elaborate rag dresses with all the colored strips of lace and gauze. I don't think there's even much of that for V4...

Russian headdresses too, though I see some really beautiful things for Genesis in that vein.

Buy it for Genesis 3/8 at DAZ and convert it in Poser!