Kind of a tl;dr post so I'll bold the actual questions if you'd rather not much through context.

My little brother is spending his summer working on his upcoming practicum for his graphic art degree. Trying to be a helpful sister I'm going to lend a hand doing grunt work for him. His project involves some clothing elements he can't buy online and, since I'm a modeler, I'm going to try and do them for him. He likes dynamic clothing (and with those fancy college workterminals, who wouldn't?). The issue is: I've never made one. When I do use poser-esque software (I'm more of a Zbursh artist) I use DAZ Studio 3. I'm all too happy to get software to help my kin but I had to wonder about the following questions:

Can a piece of poser (probably 8) clothing have more then one 'fabric'? Like, can there be stiffer leather sections and looser cloth sections, probably along shading regions?.

Are cloth settings saved with the item when packaging? I'll be sending things to him at his college so packaging it as close to 'fresh from the rendo store' as possible will make his life easy.

Every time I see a dynamic clothign item, it's very loose, hangy and plain, no doubt to take full benefit of the cloth simulation; can dynamic clothing items have uv maps or does the simulation mess up UV maps too much**?**

Lastly: are there any no-nos for making the meshes for dynamic clothing to prevent massive errors?

I have experience making conforming clothing, but this is a bit outside of my familiarity. I'm happy to learn the ins and outs of designing, but these questions probably should be addressed before I start making meshes in a bad way. Any tutorials related to making dynamic clothing would be appreciated as well.

Check the thread

http://www.renderosity.com/mod/forumpro/showthread.php?thread_id=2829506&page=7

Quote - Can a piece of poser (probably 8) clothing have more then one 'fabric'? Like, can there be stiffer leather sections and looser cloth sections, probably along shading regions?.

Yes. You can either make separate groups in your modeler or by way of material zones. You can also use Poser's grouping tool, but I don't recommend it ;).

Quote - Are cloth settings saved with the item when packaging? I'll be sending things to him at his college so packaging it as close to 'fresh from the rendo store' as possible will make his life easy.

So long as you set up all your settings on the clothing item before you save it as a prop all the settings are saved with it and will be there next time you load.

Quote - Every time I see a dynamic clothign item, it's very loose, hangy and plain, no doubt to take full benefit of the cloth simulation; can dynamic clothing items have uv maps or does the simulation mess up UV maps too much**?**

My dynamic clothes all have uv maps and I recommend that you create them. I also have modeled tight clothes...not all dynamic clothing has to be loose.

Quote - Lastly: are there any no-nos for making the meshes for dynamic clothing to prevent massive errors?

The only things you need to keep in mind for dynamic clothing is that it needs to be a fairly higher mesh density than conformers. If it's also a clothing item that has no rigid or soft-decorated parts, then it needs to be welded. You can use either quads or tris - both will do fine.

If you already make conforming clothing, then a lot of those skills can be leveraged toward dynamic cloth. There are a few significant differences, however. Your mesh density will need to be a bit higher and "evener" in order to allow the mesh to deform properly. Also, those "canned" wrinkles and folds are not only unnecessary: they will prevent mesh from doing what you want it to during a sim.

UVMaps are respected.

I'm only starting out modelling dynamic cloth myself, so i'd wait till some of the big developers rock up with their views and suggestions, but from my experience, there's a lot you can learn about mesh behaviour from taking existing conforming cloth and running it through a sim. I did this with the Cute3D Wow dress: what an incredibly well-made garment! It sims beautifully, although I'm quite certain that was not in the developers intentions at all.

You will find the mesh has to be contiguous (all connected)... or it will fall apart during a sim. Whilst decorations such as buttons and bows can be made to behave in the cloth room, structural garment components such as grommets and laces (like, for a corset, for example) will make the sim choke. You will hear people go on about whether tri-based mesh vs quad-based mesh sims better: whatever. Both have their good sides and bad sides, depending on what you want the end result to look like. My own experience is that quad-based mesh of sufficient density will give uniformly satisfactory results. Tri-based (like delaunay's) will give a good result is the look you want is more the crumpled t-shirt look. Proof is in the sim, in any event.

I made a dress: same design, then converted one to tris. Here's the original quad-based mesh:

So, yeah, there's some crumpling at the thighs. This is an extreme pose for this cloth. I sort of still prefer crumpling to tears:

Like I said: all up to your sim, your pose and your intent.

ETA: I see one of the actual experts have managed to answer your question. Use her answers first, and consider mine as a sort of experience-qualifier.

Wow, thanks for all the quick responses. I'll be sure to come back with my invariable follow-up nightmare questions later. ^^

Okay, next Q in the 'what is possible with dynamic clothing?' line (I swear I'm going to indebted to make freebies forever for all this help =P).

Can dynamic fabric items be told hold an edge, be it partially or fully?

(warning, bad sketches and crude handwriting await)

the one on the tight I imagine I could do by making the top stiff and the sides more flowing, but the left I can't really think of a way to do besides maybe a displacement map.

My main reason for asking is for a situation like as follows:

A garment had a leather element sewn on top of it's fabric element. While the leather is semi-flexible, I'd want the edges of the leather shape to stay nice and 90 degrees.

Granted, there's a point where I'm just wildly over thinking things and it becomes 'if your going to need that much, make it conforming already!' I'm just trying to scope out what's possible and what's not. My thought-boat likes to go really fast and occassionally needs a 3rd party jetty to ram into, so to speak.

You're pretty much where so many of us are now with exploring this area of Poser, particularly me. Wiser heads I'm sure will come along and give you a far better answer, but I think the answer lies in those decorated groups and like that. I'm actually going to flesh out the details on this dress:

...so that there is a seam at the sides and a bit of thickness around the collar and hem and sleeves.

The initial point of this exercise was to push Poser image making further by using figures and techniques not formerly available to Poser users. Antonia bends like no Daz figure, and dynamic cloth deforms like nothing conforming. So, for the rest, we tweak. I'm sure it can be done!

Heh, with me its actually more a matter of "will be" exploring. I don't actually have Poser. My little brother (the one I'm learning this stuff to help) uses it. I'm more of a modeller, and not a very good one at that, I make a living on very erm... stylized, vector cartoons. I'm mostly learning Poser so I can help him out with his project, but since I have my mesh making tools (Blender and Sculptris) I'm plugging away at questions so I don't do something to my meshes that makes them unusable.

And yeah, dynamic clothing is amazing, back when I first got into Blender, I would waste DAYS with cloth and softbody simulations. It's a shame DAZ Studio (the poser-family software I DO use) only supports one company's products and lacks a cloth room.

Warriorpoet2006, you're well on your way.

Some additional tips:

1. lower resolutions make thicker, stiffer cloth. As you want to make edges to your clothing: reduce resolution there, instead of increasing.

2. quad meshed behave as non-woven materials: leather, rubber, fleece. Triangular meshes behave like woven / knitted materials: linen, wool, cotton, jeans, lace. As you want to make leather edges to lace blouses: triangulate the blouse and quad the edges.

3. Poser cloth room tries to mimic the laws of (real life) physics. As a result, cloth room works against you when you want to take poses or make moves or use movement speeds that cannot be made in real life when wearing those clothes of the specified making. Try to find the safe limits, and try to stay within.

I'd like to see some WIP's or so.

Have fun, all the best.