Heya, I'm letting my CPU cool down from a long bout of Max, so I thought I'd post some observations I've made over the months on building conformers (clothing, generally) I build all of my conformers using the basic concepts in Bloodsong's Painlessly Easy Conforming Clothing tutorial which I'm sure is reproduced in her book, but I still haven't gotten one. nudge I take some extra steps, though. Section A) Building the base conformer: I never start with an existing clothing item, and always use the base figure now. ALWAYS turn off IK when loading a figure to make a BC. Follow Bloodsong's steps in her tut. Also make sure the figure's hip isn't moved at all before you memorise. It's usually a good idea to 'restore figure' before you do anything, because that turns off all the k settings the CR2 loaded with. That can fix the hip being offset unless the person who made the CR2 set the initial K as the static. Along with all morph channels and inkyChains, I always strip out all occurences of inkyParent and nonInkyParent. I always remove the second figureResFile line, because it's completely unnecessary. Remove the geomChan and alternateGeom stuff from the hip, if present, and the genital actor altogether unless you mean to build a conforming condom or posable show pouch at some point. Actually, the latter you can do with only a bodyHandle anyway. Remove the stupid tab before the setGeomHandlerOffset at the bottom of the file. Poser puts that in and the indent is improper. Just because Poser wrot ethefile doesn't mean it is perfectly formed B^) Sometimes I will replace all tabs with 8 spaces, just because I hate tabs. But that's me. All of this will give you a very clean BC file to start from. Save it and keep it holy. Section B) Making specific conformers form the BC Okay, Bloodsong's tut says to plug in the figureResFile and go. Well, sure, but that can leave you a bigger CR2 than you need, and worse, a lot of channels (that use memory in Poser) that you don't want. So here's some stuff to do... Think of your figure as working from the hip OUT. So the hip is the middle and everythign is steps away from it. This is how Poser thinks of it. You need the hip, and you need everything between the hip and up to and including your geometry. You need actors one past your geometry. You do not need anything past that. NOTE that means if you have gloves, you need all the way to the finger3 parts. AND you need the neck but NOT the head. Why the neck? Because it's one past the chest. If you're doing one glove to package with sparkly socks and a mutilated nose morph, you need the Collar of the opposite side, too. Without it things will not fit because your endpoints will work out wrong and not balance. You do NOT need any body parts more than one off. If you have no hip geometry, you do not need anything on the other side of the hip. A halter top does not need buttocks or thighs. A boot does not need an abdomen. HOWEVER, a pair of trousers which DOES have hip geometry DOES need an abdomen. To avoid confusion with any of bloodsong's terminology, from here on in, JP affectors means the twisty, jointx, and stuff like that (these appear right before the rot channels), while child JP affectors will mean things like lShldr_twistx (these appear higher up near where morph dials go and above the zOffsetA stuff. Now, the trick is, once you have removed all these other, nonexistant actors, you still have several actors that can be cleaned up and cut the channels. First off, remove the geometry handlers in the declaration blocks (the first instance ofthe actor block near the top). So if your shirt ends at lForeArm and there's no geometry for lHand,the lHand declaration should look like:

actor lHand:2
        {
        }

That's it. Next, remove the affectors in those parts. Each actor's affectors affect only IT, not any other actor. That means, usingthe example above, your lHand actor shold have all the twistx_lForearm channels, smoothScale_lForeArm channels, and twistx channels removed. Each of those channels uses up memory in Poser. Clear out channels that aren't needed. NEVER remove the rotation channels or the Offset channels. Good idea to leave in the trans channels too, even though you can't see them except for the hip. I usually DO remove the scale channels and taper channel, because it's silly to scale something with no geometry. If you do this, you can also remove the smoothScale channel from the actor they join to/are parented by. If you don't, you can theoretically use the scaling and tapering as a way to slightly alter the parent actor, but an MT is better for that because it's more exact. Do NOT remove the affector channels form any actor that HAS geometry. You need that stuff. Of course once you load up your conformer and set the materials, Poser will put the silly tab before setGeomHandlerOffset back and will add the stupid other figureResFile line, but you can always clean these back up afterwards. Actually, I usually save it to another CR2 and rip out the parts it added and stick them in my original copy. Same with adding MTs.