Hello, This may be a somewhat dumb question but I'm going to ask anyway. I would like to place the female figure sitting on a chair and have her legs casually crossed. She will be wearing a skirt of course. My question: Is there a way to have the Cloth Room fit the skirt to her as it should be in this pose without having to make it an animation? I'm trying to create a single frame image. It would seem that just posing the figure, adding the skirt and clicking Create Simulation is just not the way it's done. Any help is appricated. Thanks in advance for your time! Nebula

Yes, you can. You do need to allow some frames for the simulation to be calculated, then simply render the final frame.

Unless you are using conforming clothing you will have to do the animation. Go about it this way.

• Load the figure and turn off all IK chains
• Use the button in the Joint Editor to zero the pose
• Set the hip and body x, y, z Translations to zero.
• Open the Animation controls and keyframe frame 1.
• Advance to the end (the default is frame 30, try this to start with. Add more frames if required.).
• Pose your figure
• Set a keyframe.
• Return to frame 1 and load the clothing prop. It should fit exactly.
• Into the cloth room and let it do its thing. Select the option "drape from zero pose" when its given you.

Now I'm sure you'll need to tweak here and there, and I'm still learning how to get this down also, but that is how I would go about it.

If I read the manual correctly, the Create Simulation will "pre-drape" the cloth over the collision objects. "Calculate Drape: Clicking the Calculate Drape button calculates the cloth object's draping behavior and caches the simulation. When calculating the simulation, cached drape settlings are added before beginning cloth simulations, meaning that the settled cloth drape is at frame 1 before the simulation begins." What I get from this is that before any dynamics are added for animation effects (collision, motion, wind), the cloth is draped over objects that are set for collision with the drape. So you should be able to get a 'still image' of the draped cloth even without adding animation dynamics. Beyond that I can only guess since I'm not up to the point of playing with the cloth room. Kuroyume

wow, philc... is that the procedure for every figure that i want to wear dynamic clothes? do we have to repeat the procedure every time the pose changes? and the last one: why do you have to do first five steps?

I feel I'm right in saying that the majority of Poser users create static images only. We are used to posing the figure and using the conforming clothing. Now along comes Poser 5 with dynamic cloth and we have to change our way of thinking. If we want Vicki on a windswept quayside facing the stormy waves wrapped in a trenchcoat we have to tell Poser 5 which way the wind is blowing and how she is standing. Yes we have to learn new methods, myself included.

I think at the end of the day we will settle down to using the best of both the conforming and dynamic worlds. We will conform the trenchcoat to Vicki same as we used to but use the dynamics in Poser 5 to blow the coat tails about.

As I say I'm still learning, but I'm looking to produce clothing that will be dual purpose. Conforming and Dynamic.

It's not that complicated. 1. Pose your figure 2. Load the cloth prop (which has to fit the "neutral" pose) 3. Create Simulation, add body to collisions (make sure "start draping from zero pose" is checked). 4. Bring up "Simulation Settings" dialog 5. Set drape frames to 20 or something 6. Click "Calculate Drape". 7. The figure will do a gradual morph from neutral pose to your pose over 20 frames (or whatever you set), moving the cloth with it.

Btw, a good reason to have functioning frames after the "Drape Frames" is for variety. With dynamics you have to deal with relinquishing control to an extent. You can give it the numbers, but the outcome may very every time you run the simulation. The reason I've been running 30 standard frames was to give me a number of outcomes from which to select my "moment" for the still image. I find that calculating 30 frames only takes a small amount of time more than calculating one, and potentially saves me from the frustration of repeatedly running the same simulation to get a more desirable result. Kiera recently pointed out to me that I can shave considerably more time calculating by displaying in wireframe mode. I'm sure there are numerous other tricks like this one and that soon my POS Celeron 600MHz, 384 Mb SDRAM with Win ME will rule ass. If I can run the calc's on 30 frames, 30 drape frames, wind, gravity, and cloth for my tutorial in 58 minutes, then most people here who run Poser on much more powerful equipment should do even better. Don't get discouraged... We're adding forces over time to the equation, and once our minds change to accomodate the new rules, the results will be astounding. Paul

Attached Link: http://www.renderosity.com/messages.ez?Form.ShowMessage=865195&Form.sess_id=13386208&Form.sess_key=

When I first tried to do the same kind of thing (Judy sitting on something in her dynamic clothes and the cloth draping around her figure) I found that if you don't include the object in the simulation that the character is going to sit on, then the cloth will hang down from her legs since there's nothing there to collide with. If you place the chair underneath her afterwards, the cloth will be cutting inside the chair. After some experimenting, I figured out a way to achieve the goal and to have Judy sitting on an object (a box for simplicity's sake) and to have the cloth accurately drape over her body and be pushed forward by the "chair". I posted a step-by-step guide on how to do this, see the attached link. I have found that first I had to put the dress on Judy and do the initial simulation, then advance to a later frame and put the box under her. I couldn't start out with the chair right behind her from the very beginning, because then the dress draped and stretched over the box. Maybe there are some settings I didn't do that would have made it easier, (I'll have to experiment more), but the method worked anyway. Yes, you have to do the animation, but you can choose one frame that you like best and render that one. Has any of you experimented yet with things like hair blowing in the wind? I have not been able to do that one yet.

Attached Link: http://www.attrition.org/~demonika/enmeshed/

I'm working on wind with hair and cloth. I've got cloth working, although it needs improvement. Here's a link to my tutorial. I'm working on hair tonite, with some other things, and tweaking cloth. Paul

Thanks, Paul. Today I tried to have some wind blow Don's hard rock hair (or something like that) and it blew it right off his head! ;) Sue

I started modeling this costume this morning. Best way to learn is to do. After seeing the above posts I tried this work flow:-

• Loaded P5 female.
• Turned IK's off and zeroed figure including hip translations.
• At frame 1 set the pose. i.e. no animation.
• Loaded costume OBJ. It arrived correctly in the scene designed to fit the zero pose.
• Into the cloth room defined a new simulation and selected 30 frame drape from zero pose.
• Clothified the costume and set my collisions.
• Set the front lace up detail to be within the ridged decorated group.
• Calculated drape.

At the completion of this the costume fitted the figure pretty well. Only thing I did not understand is why part of the laces have rotated 45 degrees. Continued to add a 30 frame animation in which the figure did not move but allowed the cloth to settle. Final render as above.

Tomorrow I'll look at what happened to the laces. I've been at this for 19 hours and I think I'd better stop.

Addicted? naaaagh I can stop when ever I like :)

Hello again everybody, I just wanted to thank your all for your input and help. The more I read, the more I learn. Everyone has been so helpful. Thank you all soooo much! I will be trying all of these ideas today hopefully. I tried a simple setup last night. Zeroing the figure and adding the dynamic clothing worked well. Really hope there's a way to make Victoria clothing dynamic. Some sort of patch from CL or something. Anyway, when the dress was applied, Judy's knees protruded from the dress. Once I began the simulation, the knees were covered by the 4th or 5th frame. At frame 30, things were looking pretty good. One glitch was that her foot still protruded the edge of the dress unnaturally. I will recreate this and post for your input. I've yet to mess with any of the dials to any real degree. Here's a chance for me to figure out what they all do. Again, thanks so much for everyones input! I really believe a caring community like this makes this makes all the difference. It sure has for me. Nebula

Hello again, I thought I would post my initial results to see if anyone had an opinion on it. It's just a simple setup following PhilC's outline. Seems a bit quirky but it did finally work. Actually, the animation of this was rather cool. No chair yet. Just getting the functionallity down. Thanks!

Yeah.... Hi Fives Nebula way to go :)

Thanks Phil! I worked on another image last night. Made an animation out of it. The number of frames is important for the cloth to finish it movements. Took about 2.5 hours to render 120 frames tho. Wow. But it did turn out pretty decent I think. I don't recall how large the animation is. I'll see if I can add it to a page someplace and make a link to it. Question. I hinted at this in a previous post. I am assuming that the clothes MUST be dynamic clothing. Conforming clothing will not work. Is that true? I've never made my own clothing, tho I would sure love to know how. What is the possibility of converting existing clothing to dynamic? Is that a huge difference or is it maybe a matter of writing a program to do conversions. Another thing.... Is it possible to use the P5 dynamic clothing on Victoria 2 as is as long as I align them properly? Or are the polygons actually created for the Judy figure and will only match the Judy figure. Thanks for your time and trouble!! Nebula

The only difference between Poser 4 clothing and the dynamic clothing in 5 is that some of the P4 clothing has caps. To explain, look up one of the P4 sleeves and on some you will see that its closed. This capped end will intersect the figure. This is not allowed in Poser 5 dynamic cloth because it works on collisions. If the cloth is already colliding with the figure then it throws it out of wack. So in essence any clothing may be used on any figure provided that at the zero pose no part is actually touching the skin. Now how well they will fit after draping is anyone's guess. It will be like wearing someone else's clothes.