I only have Poser 3, and before I fork out for Poser 4: After all the talk I have heard of "conforming garments": WILL PLEASE someone answer me:- - Is is possible to have a posable model which is partly a conforming garment and partly not? That would be a handy way of making the backpack harness part of a model of one of the many things that are carried on the back: (rucksack, scuba diving or other breathing apparatus, flamethrower, spray-pack, a horse's harness, etc): If possible, that would be a lot easier than having to dissect the backpack harness into a cat-o-nine-tails of chains of many small segments with the "curve" property as I am having to do now in Poser 3. - Plus the fiddle of having to give each "tail" a proximal and distal end dummy short non-curve segment to avoid kink bugs. - Can a posable garment be used alone, i.e. not worn by anyone? If e.g. a horse's harness model is made as a posable garment, how to pose it not on a horse but draped over a table or hanging on a hook in the harness room?

The garments conform because they have the same joint parameters and body part names as the figures. I would think that if one of the parts didn't have a corresponding part on the figure, it would not conform. The only problem is, I don't think any part of a conformed garment can be reposed once it's conformed to a figure even if it has no matching part to conform to. I guess this would take a bit of experimenting to know for sure. -JH.

The trick with doing thing like hanging up a harness and having it drape, or piling it in a corner is one of the items on a list of "10 Challenges for Computer Graphics" in a article I saw in Computer Graphics World a few months ago. Basically, it is beyond state of the art in any program. You can do some clever stuff with P4, stuff that is impossible with P3, but it is a bit buggy. So don't toss P3 if you install P4. At least, not yet.

Clothes in Poser 4 are just figures like the female figure. They have matching body parts and joint parameters as the figure they are intended for. When you select Conform, the clothes will try and match the postion and rotation of the host figure's joints. The clothes can be loaded seperately and displayed with no figure (since they are figures themselves). Yes you can attach a generic harness to a figure then apply a "pack" to that. whether the harness is a prop attached as a child to a body aprt or a figure depends on how well each scheme works. The simplest approach is to attach the harness as a prop. This however causes problems since props don't conform very well.

Likely such things as the girl's bra straps turning to spaghetti, as Allerleirauh complained about hereinabove, are caused by extrapolating out to the garment the equations that adjust the model's skin. In physics in general, extrapolating fitted equations is "um heap bad medicine", as I learned long ago over many years when helping students with computer programs as part of their degree projects.