im just curious what the difference between a cr2, say victoria.cr2 for example, and a cr2 that can be used to conform things to her body. is there a simple edit that has to be done to the cr2 for each body part for example? im just thinking it would be VERY cool to have a base cr2 that conformed to EVERY SINGLE body part so that if you were in the business of making clothes you could simply use the same cr2 over and over. i have found and used several conforming cr2's, but they only cover some, or most parts of the body, NEVER every single part. thanks for any tips! Brian

heyas; you can try out my "painlessly easy conforming tutorial," and see if you like that. ;) there did seem to be some problem with my method and conforming to victoria (or was it stephanie?), but i don't have victoria, so i'm not sure. it works on all my animals and stuff.

cool where can i check out the tutorial? also, i did get the poser wizard program from the MP, it looks like, if that does what it says it does, it's a one stop insta conformer, and will even let me make conformers that have extra parts unrelated to the body of the character you are conforming to. i have not yet tested though so not sure yet.

Attached Link: http://www.3dmenagerie.com/index-goo.htm

thanks! i will check it out

Glad to see people talking about the Poser Wizard. And now for another note. Bloodsongs tut basically tells you how to do this by hand, and in actuallity I recomend doing at least one like this all the way through it. The Poser Wizard essentially does this same process but without you editing any of the files by hand. Darkworld, Your original question about what the differences were I don't think has truely been answered. Essentially there is no difference between a conforming figure and on that is not advertised that way. All CR2's are conforming. In the CR2 there is a conforming entry but it is not used. No telling if this will be required in the future though.

heyas; i disagree, kattman. well, the cr2 structure isn't different, and that 'conformto' entry is useless. but there is a difference between the conforming figure and a non-conforming figure, and that's the initial pose of the conformer has to be zeroed. a 'regular' figure can be pre-posed (in fact, it is supposed to be, for the ik chains). of course, a lot of 3rd party figures are zeroed by default, so there wouldn't be any discernable differences between a 'normal' and 'conforming' cr2.

About zeroing, Keep in mind that the underlying OBJ for the character is the zeroed figure. If you build your confomring clothing around that OBJ then your clothing will be zeroed in the proper place. Now create the CR2 for the conformer and you can actually still start with the changes in the characters CR2. In other words the hip for the conformer can still be set to the .010 setting just like the original character. When you tell poser to conform it, the hip will be changed to reflect the setting in the character. If you didn't change the defualt pose this 'changes' the hip of the conformer to .010, essentially making no change. Move the hip of the character to .015 and the hip of the conformer will move to .015. So you see, you don't have to start with a zeroed conformer, you just need to make sure that the zero values for both the conformer and the character will place the items in the same location. This means modelling the clothing item around the original character OBJ and not from an exported copy of it.

hmm, well i KNOW there is a difference with conformers, otherwise you could just make an outfit for victoria, and then use victoria.cr2 as your conformer to point to your obj; just remove the morphs and change the materials... but in fact this does not work. my basic goal is to come up with a full body conformer cr2 that i can just keep using over and over, for both victoria and michael; and im talking conforming right down to the finger joints =)

OK, tell me why that doesn't work? I haven't found an issue where it hasn't worked yet. Well granted, sometimes you need to play with spherical falloff zones but the actuall centers of rotations work like a charm.

wow so for you guys you can just use the victoria.cr2? if that's the case then why does anybody ever do text editing? when i do it (even after placing the conformer perfectly) when i click Conform, the outfit is WAY off. hmm, maybe there is a step i am missing somewhere. earlier though i asked how to make an item conform, and the quick answer was- use a cr2 that is already conforming (which i have and it works great =) and apply it to your obj. if there is NO difference between a normal cr2 and a conformer, why would using a conforming cr2 matter in the first place? or perhaps i guess it could be because victoria.cr2 is a big unwieldly file; and if all you are making is pants you dont need a cr2 that conforms to the whole body. i guess i should get back in the lab and do some more testing =P

Let me give you a bit of background here. The poser wizard has a conforming wizard and here is how it actually works: You build your new clothing item and need to make it conform. You load it into the Conforming Wizard (CW). You select the Character CR2 it is to fit and load it as the target. Upon pressing load, the CW reads all the parameters from the existing CR2 and strips out the un-needed lines such as morph dials and such. Next it reads the OBJ file and looks for the named groups, any groups matching the actor listings are automatically matched up. Any groups that don't match exactly it saves in a list. You can then use the CW to match up these names to existing actors or create a new actor for them. Once everything is matched up, the CW will allow you to save the new CR2. Now the new CR2 will have all body parts in it. THis means that even a pair of pants has the full listing, including the fingers. Now you ask why not have just the parts needed? Well this leads into your problem. If you look at a CR2 you will notice that the neck has some settings referencing the head. If there is no head actor defined then things get real flaky and will get twisted out of shape and not look at all correct once you conform. There are two ways to fix this. You can either add the head (which the CW does) or you can go through and make sure you remove all listings in the neck that refer to the head. I chose to go with the first option due to small issues with conforming. If you remove the references to the head from the neck and you attempt to tilt the head, the neck part of the shirt will not move correctly. This requires an empty listing for the head so that the bend parameters will work properly. I could go one step further I believe. I'll talk about arms for this one. The collar connects to the shoulder and the shoulder to the forearm. If the shirt you model stops at the collar we know we will need the shoulder in order to get the bends to work properly. but we don't necessarily need the forearm. I'm thinking about one more upgrade to the CW that basically goes actor plus one. This would remove everything from the forearm down from the resulting CR2. I'll be working on that code after I get a few more of the add-ons completed. From this you may be able to figure out why your conforming CR2 didn't work properly when you hand edited the cr2. Perhaps you removed an actor and missed a reference from it's parent piece or missed a reference to it's child piece. You still need to edit the file to get the references, and many people do that. Some will strip out the un-needed sections and you really need to hand edit then. Alternatively you can use a blanked out reference CR2 as a starting point, this makes things easier.

no no no.... the joints have to be zeroed. the body/hip trans is not zeroed, for a conformer. the reason for this is, because conforming adds the joint rotations together. so, if the forearm is bent 3 degrees in the k1 value (the memorized pose of the figure), then you plug in your clothing to that cr2, the clothing will have a 3 degree bend on it before you conform. after it conforms, it will be 3 degrees off the target's forearm. so the pose has to be zeroed so the clothes don't wander off the limbs. so you can't use the regular victoria cr2, because the limbs are slightly posed. you need to make a zeroed-pose cr2 out of victoria, and THAT will conform.

I'm going to have to double check this before I actually respond. I believe you are wrong but if you are correct I am going to have to change the code for my conforming wizard. This is definatly going to take some research as I can't rely on what I have seen happen without verification due to the ramifications.

Where can I get this Poser Wizard from?

heyas; it is in the marketplace, anthony. i'm pretty sure that conforming resets the positioning and the scaling, so the base doesn't use zeroed tanslations for the hip/body. if having them zeroed makes any difference or not, i'm not sure. but i've always done it that way. i definitely know that scaling has to be applied to a conformer after it has been conformed; anything changed before conformation is reset. for scaling. kattman, do you know why michael's chest sometimes comes out crooked on conforming stuff for him? and how to fix it? :)

bloodsong, are you talking about mikes chest when you conform an item to him, or are you talkign about the chest of the conforming item? If it is the chest of the conforming item then it is probably due to the fact that you need an actor+1 setup. What I'm talsking about is this. If you clothing item stops at the chest, you have to remember what the children of the chest are. These are the neck, lcollar and rcollar. These body parts should be included in the CR2. The reason behind this is due to the fact that body parts are sometimes affected by thier children. If you look at Mike's chest you will see entries there for these child parts. You can add these parts without having any geometry for them by having the reference listed for the part but leave the reference empty. You will need to include all the dials for this body part in the actor listings but set that actor to hidden 1 so it won't show. Now if you are talking about Mike's chest changing, I have no idea as I haven't seen that happen as yet.

Ok here is the skinny on the K values and conforming: Short answer, bloodsong is right. using his example. If your conformer body part uses a k value of 3 and your pose gives the character body part a 3 then your conformer ends up at 6. This will put it off center and really screw things up exponentally as you walk down the chain. Now for the good news. This is something I knew but obviously forgot. I went back and checked my code for the conforing wizard and guess what. I am zeroing out any pose settings so all those values do get set to zero for your conformer. This is code I had for a while for my own use. The Poser Wizard was my idea to share this code with everyone. The zeroing of a pose is probably something I figured out a long time ago and coded it in but have since forgotten that it needed to be there. So yes, bloodsong was right, and so is the conforming wizard! Don't you just love these dives into the CR2?

heyas; oh, i thought you were checking to see if the hip/body trans dials need to be set to zero. :) now that's going to drive me crazy....!

well based off of this, yes they would need to be in order for the conformer to work properly. Thanks for being diligent and forcing me to remind myself of this fact.

heyas; after examinging my conformer cr2s (and messing up a stephanie conformer), i can concur that having body/hip trans settings is a bad thing. the conformers i have made, wherein i never messed with those, all have very tiny trans values. i'll have to fix my tutorial, then. now one other thing i was wondering, kattman.... does your wizard put a slight twist to things? we found out that in some instances, a conformer will twist up crazily at some settings, and to avoid/fix that, we put on an initial twist value of .001 on the conformer. now that is one step that an automated program could do a lot better and faster than hand-editing! :)

oh, you know what else....? do you delete ik statements out of the conformer cr2? i'm wondering if the conformer needs those at all. especially since the automatic leg ik messes conforming up pretty bad.

heh, actually I don't remove the IK and I don't add the twist. The CR2's that come from the wizard don't have problems even with this info in them. I think it has to do with the fact that I am making sure that all the chains go all the way. Essentially the leg IK goes all the way to the foot just like the characters does, and the foot actor is there. I am actually adding a lot of blank actors and hiding them from the interface with hidden=1. This also helps to fix the funky twist values because the full chain actualy exists. This way, any actors that have children in the original figure will have those same children with the same rotation settings in the resulting conformer.

heyas; but ik chains named 'rightleg' and 'leftleg' are always turned on when you load the figure in poser. that is what i had trouble with. when ik was on, the conformer wouldn't pose right, and it stuck off the limbs. so i was wondering if it was better to just take them out. i dont think the twisting deal had anything to do with ik chains. then again, i'm not sure. well, if you see some twisting going on in any conformer as you bend a limb, that'd be it ;)

Rename those IK chainsd as "rightlegg" and "leftlegg".

heyas; i know that, but then they don't match the base figure's naming and stuff. (well, they match mine, since i fix all my figures, but you know what i mean.) i think conformer ik is just not needed, myself.

well you are right, it isn't needed but I haven't seen where it hurts either.