Hi, You may need to increase the size of the falloff zones for bend or you may need to change the grouping. -Mark

Well, the grouping there is all for the thing.. if I lower the abdomen or hip, things go screwey. Not sure where I change the falloff zones though...the setup room? Or could it be I just need more geometry there?

has anyone else worked on a mini skirt? they must have run into the same problem...

How did you cut up the skirt? do you have a middle hip part going all the way down and two thighs?, if so you are likely to have splitting occur when you are bending thighs. I usually make only an abdomen and hip group and take care of the posing with 7 morphs: left thigh sideways, right thigh sideways, left and right bend forward, left and right bend backwards and a sitting morphs. That usually covers most posing situations.

I didn't create morphs at all for the dress.. it's conforming, so it's following the character's morphs (Neftoon Gal) Sounds like you actually create morphs specifically for the dress... is that the better way to go? The middle "point" facing down is part of the hip, so it doesn't stretch. when I had it as part of the thing groups, it stretched, and no longer looked normal.

This kind of cutting of the groups will always give you problems on a skirt, there is no ideal way of conforming skirts but only workarounds. The morph way is IMHO the best way to go, it is a little bit more work for the modeller, and you need to adjust the morphs when you pose but you can get a smooth animation from standing up to sitting that way. I leave the abdomen part as standard conforming but the hip is driven by morphs.

hmmm Not sure I know how to do that, have the abdomen and upper parts conform but not the hip. Thanks

If you don't have thigh bones in your garment it won't try to conform to the ones of the figure, as simple as that.

Oh ok I can do that! lol Thanks ;o)

You can also keep the thigh bones on the garment skeleton while having only the hip group, the skirt will pose rather well but you will not be able to sit her down, because both thigh's influence will raise the middle front of the skirt.

Thanks DominiqueB :)

Ok, guess it's time to make some dress morphs. Now a good question.. can you export a poser character posed, so you can then use that for referencing the dress's morphs? I'm thinking I'll need side left, side right and then forwards and back for each leg. Now I know why you see so many long dresses and pants, where you make the legs invisible...

Don't know Gary, but I'm gonna try exporting Alexa posed and see what happens! lol

Make the hip group narrow as it approached the bottom. If you own any other dresses or skirts for this model take a look at it's grouping. You can edit the joint params in the main window of Poser. Select Window > Joint Param. Make sure you have lButtock or lThigh group selected (depending on how you grouped it). Change the drop-down in the window to Bend. Select the scale dial back in the params window and increase the scale. It's hard to describe this without images so please take a look at the section on this in the Poser help file.

ok, you can import a pose character out as a reference.. but modelling the change is a royal pain in the butt!

lol Tell me about it! I am trying to get a sitting pose! Yikes! lol

Well Now I can't get the morph to load! it tells me the target geometries has the wrong number of Vertices? I'm using rhino, anyone have a clue about this? Thanks

you can't add or remove points when making your dress morph..

If you try morphing an already posed mesh, your deltas will work in the wrong direction when it gets un-posed. Say you have a skirt exported in the sitting position and you add Y translation to it - that will remain as Y translation back at the posable garment - in other words, 90 degrees out. You can make morphs this way, but you have to keep your 3D wits about you, and a lot of trial and error is going to be involved. Another approach for a skirt is to add a ghost body part or 'body handle'. In setup room terms, I think that would be a separate 'skirt' bone. Omit the thigh bones (or rename them so they don't conform) and you have a solution which doesn't require morphs; or not as many of them, anyway.

You should plan your morphs early on in the modelling process. I don't know about other software but in LW I work in nurbs, basically a low poly cage that gets subdivided when modelling is finished. So all the morphs get done early on when I have maybe 40 polygons in the skirt area. Much easier to deal with than wrestling with 500. The beauty of it is that in LW you can add as much detailing as you want it gets transfered to all the morphs which are an integral part of the object file. When everything is finished subdivide the mesh ,freeze the object, cut out the body parts and start exporting the object and the morphs to obj.

Yeah, I froze the dress once I used booleans to create the collar and the bottom. I saved before, but have done so much work on it since then that I hate to roll back... live n learn...

Stay away from booleans as much as possible when you model. If you have a kept a previous version of your work before you froze, you could try a morph on the skirt section, freeze it load it in a background layer, and hiding everything else but the part you worked on in the foreground layer try a morph to background sometimes it works.

Yeah booleans are pretty sloppy, but how else can you do cut outs of the neckline, or arm holes, and make them look correct?

Hmmm guess I will work on mine later and start with the original mesh, and do morphs as I work :) Back to the drawing board! lol

I'm thinking similar things, but at least I have like 4 different versions of backwork.

Glad you have more to work with than me! lol