In my desire to make clothing, I can't get anywhere with the manual, and every tut that I have found is PC specific and always loaded with shorthand jargon at critical points. Is there something for the primary schoolers?

Contact nomuse, who may be able to help.

Much depends on your modelling application. But I can give you a few Mac-related pointers. First is that a lot of the lovely free or cheap modelling software people talk about haven't been ported. The good news is Wings -- pretty much the best place to start for Mac organic modelling; and Wings is totally free. There aren't as many cool utilities on this side of the fence, either.... and phi conversion is crap on the Mac. You are going to have to learn to speak a little cr2. Think of it as doing HTML yourself, without benefit of DreamWeaver. All it takes is a basic text editor -- like BBedit lite -- and a little patience. Oh, yeah...and a willingess to take apart other people's work to see how it was done. I'm a confirmed artist type myself. Computer stuff drives me crazy. So if I can learn this stuff, then anyone can. The devil is in the details, but there are really three basic steps. One is modelling, for which you need modelling software. Two is editing a cr2 so it uses your new model; there's where BBedit comes in. Three is loading into Poser and using the Joint Editor to adjust the joints. Don't get confused by all the stuff about EasyPose and phi conversion and ProPack and Grouper and DeepPaint and MorphManager and Tailor. You'll get there in time. All you need right now is Poser, a text editor, and something to model with. And the willingness to accept that there is no push-button way to do it -- you gotta get down in the dirt with the polys and wrestle those joint centers into order.

Oh, yeah....come out to chat sometime! There's loads of people willing to help, most nights. There are some good Mac tutes around. Mostly I read between the lines of the Winders tutes, based on what I've already learned. What I posted above was an attempt to give you the same kind of overview and a similar ability to sort wheat from chaff.

Then I'll go ahead and compare a figure's cr2 to its attire. Thank you.

One tip on phi files, nomuse. They usually don't work with raw Carrara (or other) obj files, but they usually work with obj files that have been imported to Poser, centered properly and checked for group names, then re-exported with Poser's formatting.

Actually, that's part of my secret to clothing and morphs. I import to Poser, load the figure I'm fitting to, then set the interface to wireframe and use the ortho cameras until I have everything sized and placed to my satisfaction. I find this simpler for me than "magic triangles" and other tricks. (I didn't mention that I of course turn off IK, zero the figure and set the BODY and hip translates to zero. But that sentance above was getting a little too long to fit that in.)

The obj I used for the phi file was created in Amapi, wouldn't register as I tried to create a hierchy file, and failed once more after being filtered through Carrara. Glad to have the recommendations.

I've found both Poser and UVmapper as nice tools to make a recalcitrant obj file behave. I've also had some issues with Carrara...flipped normals, mostly.