heya had a quick tailor question: if i create a suit for basic vicky 2 - meaning i dont change any of her body morphs, just make the suit tailored perfectly to her body... then conform it to her, lets say for arguments sake that this is a suit of conforming chains... afterwards, can i use the tailor to transfer custom vicky morphs to the suit? will it still conform with no problems? how well does this work, how accurate is it? 50% accurate, 80%? 90%? im basically working on modelling some items for vicky. i despise vicky's standard body, i think its unnatural and gangly looking. but i think it would be easier if i modelled the items for stock vicky, then added morphs to fit my custom characters as an addition - this way people could use them with all of their characters. how viable is this? i dont own tailor, so i dont know if this would be possible, or if it would be a good solution. cheers, -gabriel

Generally, the Tailor works very well. Sometimes the morphs will have a "crinkled" effect. On the things I've tried, higher poly counts help. About 80-90% of the time, it has good results for me. I believe CodeTwister has a demo up if you want to give it a shot and see if it works for you in general.

I have also used Tailor and gotten very good results. However, it will shift clothing exactly to match body morphs. This is very good because it helps ensure that clothes follow body movements of morphed figures closely. This is bad if your morph is odd-shaped (i.e. expands one section of polys and shrinks another) because Tailor will follow this exactly. This can cause warping of textures on clothes, and strange wrinkles to appear.

It also doesn't work on all clothing. For Victoria's Basics, for example, it worked wonderful on everything I tried (which wasn't all of them) but the Tshirt. The Tshirt was a disaster. It also did very strange things to BillyT's LeatherLaceupWear.

But when it works, it's damn impressive.

I've even (don't tell anybody this) transfered Victoria morphs to the VinaD mesh and to Stephanie, and Steph morphs to Victoria. For the VinaD mesh, it worked poorly on the hi-res mesh, but worked acceptably (but far from perfect) on the low-res mesh. This implies it works better when the poly densities between the meshes are approximately the same.

Blackhearted, I'd be very wary of Tailor for these purposes - I bought Tailor specifically because of your Ki character (SUPERB character, btw - probably my all time fave). You gave excellent instructions on how to make clothes fit her, but I thought that Tailor might provide me with a shortcut. It turned out that it couldn't cope with Ki at all. In fact, despite the way some people here praise it, I found Tailor totally useless for Ki and all my other favorite characters. I ended up returning it for a refund.

Blackhearted: 1. Definitely model on the basic Vicky body, then supply a full-body morph to shape to your character. This will allow people to use your clothes with ALL Vicky-derived bodies. (Either via Tailor, or via not-yet-available solutions.) 2. Tailor is the only currently available solution I know of that does what you want ( not counting high-end 3D modeling packages that may have such a feature). Even in the worst case, it would be a useful "rough version" of the needed morph - then take the output into LightWave or other 3D modeler, and tweak it slightly as needed. I think it will be worth your while to purchase it. 3. I'd be happy to run a sample of your character + clothing through my copy of Tailor and send you back the result. If you aren't comfortable e-mailing to me your current character, then send me some older one that is similar enough that you can learn something from my Tailor-ing of it. -- ToolmakerSteve steve@shawstudio.com

Attached Link: http://www.daz3d.com/pages/dp/development/developright.html

Blackhearted: If you are a LightWave user, the attached link leads to a plug-in that moves points along their normals [PointNormalMoveP.zip]. This may be useful for tweaking a morphed cloth by moving any problematic points slightly further away from the body. -- ToolmakerSteve