Posted this in the main forum, but got no replies. Hope someone can help here: Hey all...don't post here much, but I hope someone can help me with this. Using Xurge's great tutorials over at RDNA, I decided to create something for Vicky. So, jumping right in, I've modelled a dress, rather tight I might add. The problem is in the CR2. I grouped the dress into basic components (most are hidden right now, still a WIP), but using ISOPs ML dress as a model I decided to group the whole dress bottom as the "hip." I used his CR2 as a starting point and managed to get this far (reference the image.) Right now, the dress (hip) conforms nicely to the Vicky's thigh movement. The shin, however, is another story. Note how shin movement is totally ignored by the dress. O.K. here's the request. 1) What commands in the CR2 are allowing the hip to conform to Vicky's thigh? I pretty much just copied the MLDress CR2 right on over, and still haven't figured out what's doing what here. 2) Can I get the shin to do the same thing? 3) Has anyone successfully modelled a dress that will allow total movement? i.e. Sitting and standing poses? If so how? Lotsa questions!! :) Thanks for the help...this is more fun than I ever imagined. The modelling has been a challenge, but it's great when you finally get something to work! Bom

2) Can I get the shin to do the same thing? No. Each side of the shins part of the skirt would have to be a shin. And that would run into the same problem as with cross-welding the fingers in e.g. a dragon wing. And you would have to text-edit extra weld commands into the dress's .CR2 file. And that would %$&#;@&* the rendering because of some funny bug (at least in Poser 4).

Attached Link: http://poserpros.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=6502

I wasn't aware of a good way to do long dresses. Started looking at different people's clothing to see what they did. I found that Anton's Egyptian Long Skirt did succeed in conforming to both thigh AND SHIN motions, even though it is just a hip geometry. See attached URL at PoserPros.

Thanks Toolmaker!! It's got me going in the right direction I think. Take a look at the screen shots, though. I think the MWLongDress JPs aren't right for my dress...or is it something else?

BTW...I didn't cut thigh pieces out of the hip yet. Just imported the Anton dress into Rhino and "stole" his lshin/rshin handles. It works pretty good actually...that is, until she sits down! :)

Do you think I should cut out the thigh parts and use those as well, or is this merely a JP issue right now.
I can manipulate a CR2 fairly well, but I truly don't have a good understanding of it all. Just cut and paste until something works. :(

Sitting down is another can of worms altogether - you just found that out, I think. :-) Steve Shanks has used an interesting technique on a couple of PoserWorld long dresses, though I haven't got around to trying it myself. The skirt is split into hip, rThigh and rShin - no left hand parts at all. This is fine for a tight skirt - she sits down, the skirt conforms to her right leg, and you just need to tweak the dress and/or her left leg until it all fits. If you wanted a stretch fabric effect, then some morphs would be needed.

hmmmm...interesting. I'm a member of PoserWorld, luckily...so I'll take a look at what he's done. Do you know which dresses use this technique?

There ya go then, sorted... :-) For Vicki, the "Evening Tight Gown" has a combined leg version as well as a conventionally cut form; for Posette, there's the "Sari Separate Skirt". Looking forward to see what you come up with, since I'm experimenting in this area myself.

What is needed is to get rid of that stupid bug in rendering that makes pulled-toffee effects when rendering a character with extra Weld commands edited in. I suspect that the Weld command is expected to also calculate information needed by other processes, and thus omitted or extra Welds throw things out of gear.

1. POSER5 HANDLES THE EXTRA WELD COMMANDS! This means that techniques that weld "left" and "right" together can now be tried - at least for Poser5 only clothes. 2. no left hand parts?? I should try this before posting, but, but - how can she WALK in it? Oh - there are TWO separate versions? Gah, I hope we see a posing product soon that can handle dresses better than this! ************************************************* 3. IMPORTANT - DO NOT CONFORM a dress made with Anton's technique!!!!!!!!!!!!! That is, his technique can only be used with a dress that is separately posed from the body. If you do "conform to...", as you see, the parameters go haywire. There is no way around it with this technique. Sorry. For example: * Pose the person; * Save the person to Pose library; * Select the dress; * Apply that new pose to the dress. Yup - this has to be done for EVERY SINGLE POSE you use the dress in. Sigh.

...and see the PoserPros thread I mentioned above. I added references to various other relevant threads. And Jim Burton gives his opinion (as one of those who has been through this battle many times) that there won't be a totally satisfactory solution given the current Poser code. Maybe Poser6 ;)

Thanks Toolmaker. I've been following the threads at PoserPros as well, trying to make head or tails of this situation. Yeah, although Anton's system gave me some hope, I pretty much scrapped the idea when I couldn't get it to work. Right now, I'm back to using ISOP's MLDress CR2. It has EMC lines that allow you to adjust the bottom of the dress (lFlare, rFlare.) My problem now is trying to get the joint zones setup right so the bending occurs naturally. Since this is supposed to be a tight dress, I may try Jim Burton's method of just creating a lThigh, lShin and seeing if that does any better. Perhaps I can even try to set up some lines that will allow for some leg spread movement via EMC.