I've been playing with the whole control handle/bod handle thing, and I was having real problems with it in a serious way. Every time I tried to bend the legs, there'd be a huge bubble formed by the movement, which was not at all what I wanted. It bugged the hell out of me that Anton's skirt didn't do this, so I constructed a simple skirt cut the same way (actually the same skirt just regrouped with the little sideways body handles added and my 'bones' like effect handles removed) and plugged it into his CR2 as the figureResFile The balooning still happened. Then I took a closer look at Anton's mesh. There are no vertices between the legs. Nada. Just stretched faces from one leg to the other. Whattya know. I decided to test the theory, loaded up Anton's mesh and sliced vertices into the middle of that expanse of facets. I plugged the modified ROE skirt in as the object fora copy of his CR2 and hey, figure that -- balooning worse than mine even! (More like pointing in this case) Now, it would seem that this would provide a solution, but alas, there's this problem if wanting to have some non-tight skirts. Non-tight skirts would be a nice thing, I think. A great goodness. But for non-tight skirts, to make the proper folds and furrows, you need polys. And that means vertices. Right where you apparently can't have them, because all the vertices for either side HAVE to remain within the spherical mat zones for the leg they apply to, and can ONLY fall within one. Apparently, it's falling within two inner MAT zones that creates the balooning effect. Anyone have any ideas?

for the v3 tunic I made, I added control handles at both the front and the back of the skirt to take care of that. For whatever reason, DAZ released V3 so that when she enters a scene, she is in a crouch. This crouch, by default, makes all skirt-type outfits conform with that nasty deformity in the front. While the simple fix is to put a note in the readme to get her out of that crouch, we all know that the majority of people do not read readme files (unless the actually SEE something different about your outfit which makes them curious as to what it is)...tis the nature of the beast. So, anyhow...when creating the tunic..the whole skirt from the hip down is one body part..the "hip". Inside are two small spheres which I called lThigh and rThigh so it would conform and move properly and smoothly while deforming uniformly. Still, if you bend the legs, you get that deformity. ...

here is the skirt...you can see the handles, the hip and the thighs. The joint is actually upside down from normal and the handle is down beneath the skirt so the user WILL see it and know that there is something more to work with there. Perhaps they will read the readme file then OR maybe they will click on it to see what can be done with it. anyhow, by putting small falloff zones in the center of the upside down joint..when rotate the handle, the skirt can be deformed back into a more natural shape. The picture shows the side/side rotation..but I used the same falloff zones for all three planes so it would only affect that small unnatural deformed area. Another plus about this is that you can add natural wrinkles to the center of the skirt by rotating the handles. :) BT

Good approach, thanks! I was on the werge of trying to make an antimorph, but those work less the more extreme the pose goes, even if it's built as a metamorph. Cool!

actually dodger this begs a discussion about control handles all together in relation to vicky3. The attached images shows an outfit (untextured) I am making for her. its extrememly detailed..and tho its no larger in poly count that is necessary, when you start adding everything up...RAM becomes an issue with some V3 users. I mean think about it.. ya got v3 (a beast on ram by herself) ya got v3 morphs (ooooooo..now we're talkin'!) ya got v3 textures (ouch..that hurt) ya got hair (textures and any associated morphs...what's that smokey smell?) ya got an outfit (textures for each, morphs and a partridge in a pear tree...damm the computer just caught fire!!!) lol anyhow, it adds up and tho Im not having problems with 384 ram and doing what I do others with less ram may have with some figures and setups. Depending on who made the clothes, their experience, and the number of morphs and stuff. what this all leads up to is perhaps instead of many morphs being included..adding control handles instead to change the shapes in the areas you can instead of morphs. This would be much more computer friendly for the end user. ...

for instance.. look at this hair (made by using a variation of the fur technique)...if control handles were added to it, you could make significant shape and appearance changes while keeping the file size relatively small in comparison to adding a bunch of morphs to do the same thing. anyhow... just a thought :) BT

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Poor girl's gonna get pneumonia standing on the prow of a ship L Good point, though this reply is mostly to get the udity tag in there.

ope, xpost.

yup

I found out by playing with the fall off zones on the ghost thighs in my dresses I can get them to work through about the normal range, the pic on the left shows the V3 default crouch. Go too far and it does start to deform, though, per the middle pic. The problem is the overlap of the two bend zones, of course, if you set them properly for non-symetrical bends you get this, if you set them for equal bends in the legs they don't work right for non-equal ones. My answer to this was have a separate ghost joint for when you need to go past the normal range, like to a sitting pose. The idea is to back off the conforming parts and apply it manually, or have a Pose to do the same thing.

Is Vicky going bowling in that dress? ;)

Ha! Ha! ;-) The shoes are just in the construction stage, with only some of the materials set, I love it the way Poser give you different colors everytime you open them!

Actually, the colours the shoes got are very, very 80s. L I think my mum owned a pair of sneakers in those very colours! So the general consensus is that a third leg of some sort to control the middle vertices is in order.