Hello all! First off I wanna thank Dr. Geep for his handy tutorials, they got me started. Now I think I am addicted heheh. Anyway the reason I am writing is to ask how I could make my own clothes for my lovely Poser models. I figured I would need another 3D program for this. I have 3D Studio Max 6. Could someone help me in this regard? Now If I do have to make them in another program is there any suggestions for plugins? Tutorials? Anything will help believe me. Preferably free, please. Thanks again

Max will do just fine. Start by looking at an existing simple garment ( not a skirt keep those for last they are a special case).My first suggestion is to load up the figure's obj from the Runtime>Geometries folder into Max, then load a simple garment's geometry, study the way the garment's is constructed in regards to the figure, look at the way the body part groups are defined. Take a look at the garment's cr2 file in wordpad (or get cr2Editor from freestuff) and take a look at how it is structured. Before you make garments you must understand how the cr2 file works. There are lots of tutorials out there, some good some not. I suggest you go to the Character and Clothing workshop forum over at http:www.poserpros.com, most of the clothing designers hang out there and are quite helpfull. Arm yourself with lots of patience you may be in for a rough ride but clothing designing is very addictive if you like an artistic and technical challenge.

Dominique Digital Cats Media

One thing to keep in mind is scale. The Poser objects are extremely small, so you'd best blow them up with a factor of 250 when you import them in Max. When you start modeling your own clothes from scratch, it's very useful to have a manikin to model around. Load the figure in Poser, disable inverse kinematics, set the figure in zero pose (don't forget body and hip!) and export. I usually use the Wavefront .OBJ format. Then import the .OBJ into Max, enlarge with a factor of 250. Then the standard Poser adult will be about 6 feet tall in Max. Model your cloth around the manikin - many different ways to do that, I use spline cages, the surface modifier and MeshSmooth. If you want to make conforming clothes, you will have to create one mesh per body part. The best way is modeling the cloth in one piece and then splitting the meshes more or less at the right position. Then export as .OBJ but don't scale it down - you'll get ugly rounding errors. Don't forget to assign materials in Max, although you also can assign materials in UVMapper (www.uvmapper.com, the classic version is free). Use Objaction Scaler (freestuff here) to scale the exported .OBJ down. It'll also rotate your object to the correct orientation. If you have ProPack or P5, you can use the Setup room to bone your clothes. The easiest way is applying the bones of an existing clothing item of the same type. If you have P4 or Poser Artist, the best way is copying the CR2 of an existing item and then hack it. I use CR2Builder by kim99 for CR2/PZ2/PP2 hacking, a very useful (and free) tool. After setting up the base cloth, you will probably have to make some morph targets that match some of the morphs of the base figure. Can be a hell of a job, especially when you make a top for V3, she's got tons of body/breast morphs and you'll probably have to make matching morphs in your clothes for about half of them... And take a look at Roy's Poser MAX tutorials (sidebar). A great way to start. If you want to design dynamic clothes, your life will be a LOT easier. No boning necessary, no morph targets needed, just a single mesh and some setting up of dynamics in the cloth room.

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