Hope everyone had a great Halloween! I'm working on a conforming dress now, and my question is, how do people make them? In other words, any type of dress is obviously not the standard hips-and-two-legs figure, because the dress is connected as one piece all the way down. How is this accomplished? Thanks! Brian

heyas; the 'trick' is to slice the dress so that no siblings are touching each other. that is, the left and right thigh's can't touch each other, only the hip. so how to do that? stick the hip down the middle between the two thighs. the shins can't touch, so the thighs go down between them. (and keep them from hitting the hip part). basically, the hip is a big T down the middle, and each leg part takes a new slice down the length. the problem starts when you have buttocks, because then the hips can't affect that chunk of hip that is between them, and the blasted thing won't bend. i was just looking at the egyptian rulers at daz, and anton seems to have come up with a design for making the dress behave nicely. they don't exactly conform, i think. (he took the buttocks out. they're a pain in the... butt, anyway.) they may also have some of his body handles on there; i'm not sure. (they don't seem to.)

I just finished one of these up (look in the Character Creators forum for pics of my Elf Mage Vicki WIP) and am going to get it beta tested by someone soon (my normal beta guy isn't available right now). I'll share some of the things I have found: Ignore the buttocks. Just have thigh parts attach to hips covering the area the buttocks exist in. If necessary, make a 'sit' MT to take care of bulging buttocks in sitting positions. It will generally conform properly even skipping the buttocks part and making it all thigh. If you go below the knee, you will want to add knee-bend MTs rather than adding shin parts. You'll probably also want to have Twist Left and Twist Right MTs for the hip, lThigh, and rThigh parts. This will let a user make the dress look like it's flowing naturally when the figure wearing it twists. Basically, you just twist the hem the opposite direction from the character's twist. You can then make Full Body Morphs that affect all three parts at the same time. Additionally, you can add FBMs to effect 'pull back' and 'zoom forward' effects by turning opposite morphs for each (i.e., 'zoom forward' would have lTHigh's twistLeft up and rThigh's twistRight up, making both sides flare forwards and bunch in the middle. Mine was really complicated as there were four 'danglies' that I needed to make multiple MTs for to let them swing about realistically. I could have made them posable parts with new body part names, but that seemed to border on silly. Instead I gave each an in, out, forwards, back, up, and 'jounce' MT ('jounce' is where the middle bounces up but the tip goes up but remains pointed down, as opposed to up where the whole thing curves up, tip and all -- point your wrist at the ceiling and your fingers at the floor to see the shape I mean). I've also noticed on the existing dresses (and this worked with mine) that the front hip should be thinner than the back of the hip, and flare a little at the hem. Somehow the shape seems to help keep things conforming properly, probably because it keeps things from stretching from too close to the middle when one leg is foreward.

wow thats a lot of good information thaks guys. ill start messing with it and see how the thighs-to-hips thing works

killer; thanks, dodger!

No worries. B^) I think I'm getting pretty good at this. If you use Bloodsong's painlessly easy method, just start with an existing Vicki dress stripped of all the MTs and valueParms and you're generally good to go.

hey, dodger; in your cr2, do you take the buttocks out, or do you leave them in, but just ignore them in your model? remember, anything you say can and will be used against you in my book ;) i have to study anton's egyptians, too.

I used a stripped-down Vicki's short dress as a base conformer to start with, since Vicki is hard to make a BC from*, and there weren't any buttocks in there that I know of. Actually, I will set it up so you can download the model at http://www.dodger.org/friv/devel/ElfMageVickiBeta and you can look. I've already set up a password for you so it's the same as before. I believe it works because the buttocks are only there as a part to make sitting and wakling look more natural -- they don't really affect the shape of things a lot. There may be some ERC or something in Vicki that handles that, too -- I honestly haven't lookd for it. Though if you look at the JPs on her thighs, they sure look like curve parts, just no curve dials. -- *But not impossible: I came up with a way... instead of zeroing her, load up her geometry as a prop and pose her so that she looks totally mottled with the colour of the statue and memorise that to make the BC.