This isn't quite done as it conforms a little funny (in back). This dress is constructed from the sweater and the formal dress. Not simply the sweater over the dress, but taken into RD5 and changed quite a bit. The only thing from the formal dress was the bottom line (spline?) and built up from there. The sweater is mostly there with the neckline cut out and the sleeves puffed up and the alteration to the cuffs. My question is: Can I post this as an object in the free stuff or are we talking copywrite infringement? If the latter is the case, I won't post it and start from scratch and make a new dress. Is there an another way to post it. I'm on a Mac (fyi). As this has been a learning for me, it was easier to start with some existing clothing and alter it by cutting, building new parts and stretching and altering existing parts. Please let me know and thanks for your help.

Since the original meshes are, I believe, from Zygote you'd have to use Objaction to encode it & post in pcf format.

A combined figure with different poly counts? Sounds like too major of a rebuild for ObjAction Mover to work. No seed file.

It would be worth a try. If Mover won't do it, it won't be distributable.

... and nice work btw Wynter. I hope you find a way to share it.

I agree with Nance, I forgot to say how good this looks. Maybe contact zygote and see if something can be worked out.

It's true that .pcf currently doesn't support multiple seed files - there are plans to improve it sometimes in future, but it will probably take a long time. In the meantime, the only solution will be to use the .obj containing the largest unmodified portion as seed. Because both your original files ship together and can't be bought separately, you will be safe doing so. On Mac you will need Poser Maconverter to encode into .pcf, please read the enclosed manual and if you have any problems feel free to drop me a note. http://www.main-rheiner.de/homepage/soft.rabbit Cheers, MartinC

Okay, here is the information on what you can and cannot do with objects in Poser. OBJ Files - you cannot distribute OBJ files from Poser as the copyright on these meshes remains with Zygote. However, if you modify a mesh and wish to distribute it, you must use Mover to encode it. This means that, unless you have the original (seed) OBJ, you will not be able to open the PCF file. OBJ Files (Morph Targets). You can distribute as OBJ files altered body-parts (morph targets). However, you cannot distribute the entire mesh - only the part of the mesh you have morphed. Ideally, you would strip out the stuff that isn't neccessary (all non-vertex information) either using a text editor or a utility like Morph Masher. This prevents the morph target from being used to create actual geometry. CR2 files are perfectly okay to distribute, provided you do not include the original OBJ file in with them. The reason for this is that, without the original OBJ file, a CR2 will not work. So, if you can create a CR2 of your dress (without the figure in so that it looks exactly like a garment in the library), you can distribute the CR2 without any problem. The copyright question only arises when you start including Zygote OBJ-files. Hope this clears things up for you Paul

It is possible to edit the .cr2 file, along with using the group tool to assign materials from within Poser, to use one of the Poser .obj files upon which you based your geometry as the .obj for your dress. I did this with my mermaid and sea nymph figures, which is why I have people rename the P4NudeWom.obj file. I had to get creative as I could not find Objaction mover for Mac, nor could I get Mac poser to use .pcf files (this could just be lameness on my part). Anyway, in case it might help, this is what I did. On a Mac you will need a utility such as File Buddy or ResEdit to change the .cr2 file type back and forth from 'cr2T' to 'TEXT', along with a text editor capable of handling large files. It sounds like the sweater part is the least altered, so lets say you'll use that .obj file as your base. Go into poser and edit your dress using the grouping tool. Assign materials to every part that is not part of the standard sweater. This moves the geometry for those parts into the .cr2 file. Save your work. I am not sure how you built your figure, but I am assuming that the internal .obj names of each body part are the same as the standard ones. If not, that may cause you to have to do additional work. Now put aside your original .obj file. Find the sweater's .obj and make a copy and give it a different name. Now change the .cr2 for your dress to a text file and open it. There are two lines you need to change. They should both start with something like this: figureResFile :Runtime:Geometries:... Edit this path in both places to make the path point to the .obj file you just renamed. Save your work and then change the .cr2 back to 'cr2T' so Poser will recognize it. If all goes well, your figure will still work as before but will now use the renamed sweater .obj. Since anyone who has Poser 4.x already has the sweater .obj file, you don't need to give them that. You can distribute the .cr2 file only (with instructions to tell people to rename the sweater .obj file). You won't want to do this, of course, until you're completely finished tweaking the dress to your satisfaction. It's very late as I'm writing this so I hope I'm not omitting some critical step. Sorry about the long post.

Maz once recommended to post Maconverter a second time and call it "Mac ObjAction Mover"... :-) To repeat it another time - all of Mover's features are build into Maconverter, decoding happens "on the fly" during the conversion, encoding has a separate panel in the dialog box and can be chosen by the menu command. Before the good olde "why must files be typed on a Mac" discussion breaks out once again, a little note about it... Most text editors on every platform have a restriction to correct filetypes - on PC by the name, on Mac by its internal type. A typical PC text editor will only open "something.txt", but not "something.xyz" unless you force it to do so (by an option or by renaming). Same on Mac - if you use BBEdit, you get a little pop-up in the "open" dialog. As long as it says "All available", you can only open properly typed text files. Set it to "Any file", and you can open (yes!) any file. If you save it, the original type stays valid. This way you don't have to re-type it a single time with utilities. That's all.

Wow! Thanks for the response everyone. I'm saving this page and filing it with all my readmes for future reference. After I had spent long hours on it, I realized I couldn't just simply post it. Like I said, its been a great learning. I just purchased Cinema 4D yesterday, and pleased with the ease of use. Last night I started a long loose sort of hippy dress for Victoria (to wear with her ankle boots, of course :) I will try the MacConverter thing, thanks Martin, I might just be emailing you. Thanks for all the compliments.

MartinC is absolutely right that his Maconverter program does indeed do for the Mac user everything that Mover does for the PC. I gather it also does a few extra things as well. As he also hinted, I am now working on a new version of Mover that will allow multiple seed files (up to 4) plus a few other things besides. This is currently taking longer than I planned because I keep getting diverted into things like putting a roof on my garage, mowing the grass and earning a living, but we're getting there slowly. When I've got the prototype working I'll be sharing my ideas with MartinC so a Mac version will probably follow close behind. PS. I think the dress is excellent.

heyas; couple of problems.... first, because the obj is heavily modified in ray dream, it has created a new obj. distributing the cr2 won't do anybody any good, because they don't have the new obj. it won't work with the sweater obj and dress obj that everybody already has. second, if you use the grouping tool in poser, it will insert custom geometry into the cr2, making it unneccesary to distribute the new obj. HOWEVER, if i am not mistaken, this cr2-contained geometry can be used to extract the full obj, thus rendering it as a work-around for not having rightfully obtained the original copyrighted mesh in the first place. (really gotta talk to zygote about that and their distribution policies...) lastly... if the only part of the dress is the bottom edge, and the rest of it is built up new in ray dream, then i think it would encode/decode fine using the sweater as the seed file. true, the base line of the dress would be zygote's, but.... you can ask them; i don't think they would be too worried about that being distributed. :)