Blender, Poser, Photoshop --- Hello to all! Thanks so much for taking the time to view my work. And an extra thanks to those who take time to comment and/or favorite. I really appreciate it! This is a quickie featuring Dawn that I did to test whether jan19's Patchwork Dress (find it on ShareCG, we can't link to outside sites here) could be converted from conforming to dynamic. I had to constrain the straps, but otherwise it came out great. Normal people would probably use it as a hybrid and just clothify the hip (which is the skirt). It's a lovely _free_ dress she made for Dawn to complement the Faces of Africa releases. I'm using it here with Virtual World's lovely texture, materials, and morphs for Dawn (on sale now in the HiveWire3D store). Just to be clear, it's a full morph set, not a single character. And it's _loads_ of fun to work with. The pose is a very slight adjustment of a pose from Art Sorcery's set, also on sale at HiveWire3D. I mainly brought the left leg forward more and bent it more to add some interest to the skirt sim. This one is aptly named "Power." The headwrap, earrings, necklace, and sandals peaking through are from my African Wear sets currently in testing. The background is my cyclorama with one of the background materials I've begun working on for my own library. Technical info: The material on the skin is from Virtual World's set, and it's just great. I used my EM 02 Velvet on the top and my EM 02 Reflective Satin on the bottom. I may need to work on that satin a bit because I ended up boosting its highlights a bit in post. I used my softbox w/ lights prop for the backlighting, a point light with inverse square falloff for the main/frontal lighting, and the ground, my panel surround prop, and a touch of IBL for the ambient light (and reflections). In prework I sculpted Dawn's body a bit using the Morphing Tool in Poser. I touched up her shoulders a bit, and tried to shape her elbows a little more realistically. I used Dawn's Starter and Base morphs, and a touch of scaling. The necklace and shoes are actually dynamic. After the sims were all done, I switched the figure to Unimesh (Figure > Skinning Method > Poser Unimesh) and gave Dawn one level of subdivision and the dress two. I did it after the sims because just changing the Skinning Method to Unimesh can mess up the sim. To convert the dress to dynamic, I imported the mesh from the Geometries folder. I used the _default_ dynamic group on the skirt and used almost default settings, but got rid of stretch (Stretch Resistance 500) and gave it some Dynamic Friction (0.4). I made a second group with higher Fold (20) and Shear (80) Resistance, but a fairly low Stretch Resistance (80). I gave it really high friction (Static 0.95, Dynamic 0.9). I added the bodice and waistband materials to this group. Then I used the Group Editor to constrain most of the straps (comes up from clicking Edit Constrained Group). I would have made them a less stretchy dynamic group, but they were going nuts in the sim. That happens sometimes with meshes not designed for dynamics. It's a clean mesh, but some times that's not enough. I also moved the figure a bit back in the first frame, which probably would have looked a bit cooler if the dress had a train. In post, I touched up the straps using Liquify. I then used layers and Auto Level to adjust colors and make everything pop a little more. I then added masks to my color adjustment layers and painted in them to change the amount of the different adjustments. I made the hair a bit brighter to contrast with the background more, and lightened the highlights on the skirt.