By Renapd
There are so many great Poser3 poseable clothes around ..but too bad they don’t conform properly when used on Poser4 figures! Well we are going to change that thanks to Steve Cox's UV-Mapper! The problem with most of them is the fact that they include Hip but not Thigh or shin groups, a problem that is very obvious, especially if the item is long.
The perfect example for this tutorial would be Steve Shanks' old poseable evening gown. A superb item BUT with this exact problem if you bend or move posette’s legs too much! The poseable version is available at Poser world's clothes section, page 11 and we are going to solve that problem for good!
Time to start playing
Before you do anything else, make a backup folder of the original obj wherever you like on your HD. Then fire up Uvmapper and load the evegown.obj from your geometries folder (located by default in the newFemaleNudeHi folder). You will get the message that this object has no UVcoordinates and go to menu Edit/Select to create some. Do that and select the cylindrical UVmap option. You will get the following new template.
Go to Uvmapper menu Edit/Color/By group…now the template looks like this:
As you notice the whole bottom green part of that great dress is assigned to just one group ..the Hip. But we will change that very easily thanks to Uvmapper you will see! The first thing we have to do in order to be able to make much more accurate selections, is to separate the hip from the rest of the dress polygons. We have learned in the previous tutorial how to select specific groups on a figure. Therefore, select the chest and abdomen (which are the parts we don't need), minimize them and move them to the top out of our way. Your template will look something like this now.
Spend a couple of seconds to notice the way vertices and polygons are arranged in the Hip area. We are going to divide it in 3 parts, Rthigh, Hip and Lthigh, so better decide exactly how wide you wish the hip area before we go on…Drag your mouse carefully and make a rectangular selection at the right side of the hip. The following image is a good example of how close you should try to make your very first selection :
Time to start the alterations.. go to UVmapper menu Edit/Assign to Group…in the box that will pop up, change the highlighted abdomen text to rThigh like the image shows, then press OK :
Uvmapper will alert you that there is no such group and if you wish to make one. Accept this choice.
IMPORTANT TIP: ALWAYS name your selections by default poser group names (case sensitive)…otherwise they won’t show later in poser & they will be invisible!
Now carry out the very same procedure for the lThigh. Now your template should look something like this:
Time to decide on the final appearance of the template, the original one looked pretty good. Time to fix the abdomen and hip back in place. Go to menu Edit/select/All...everything on your template will get selected. Once again to menu Edit/New UVmap/Cylindrical (as originally mapped). Once again to menu Edit/select/None (to get rid of the masks) and then Edit/Color/black and white (to get the default template look). Now your map looks exactly as the very first time you loaded the mesh BUT it has also Thigh groups assigned and that makes a lot of a difference as you’ll find out!
This is the checkpoint of this tutorial - here is the point you decide if you wish to assign new materials or not, but don't worry about it now we'll deal with this later, to avoid confusion!
It's time to save our new version of the obj over the old one. Yes, don’t change the name and overwrite the old version in your Geometries folder. MAKE SURE you open windows explorer, navigate to the same Geometries directory and delete the old rsr file of the dress RIGHT NOW! Don’t worry…Poser will make a new one corresponding to the new obj as soon as you use the new grouped dress for the very first time!
If you have carried out this tutorial with the old poseable dress version this is the point where you need to edit the cr2 file as explained in my previous tutorial. Then you can fire up poser, load the new cr2 from your presets and start enjoying your new PW evening-gown conforming so much better than before. Take a look and compare:
Additional option: assigning new materials
Let’s say that you want that dress of yours to have the option of different color straps or a a different hem line, well, you can do that too if you wish! How?
Well go back to the checkpoint of this tutorial and you'll find out how easy it is!
Go to Edit/select/by material oops! it's grayed out on the specific item because there's only the default one assigned! Well time to change that too! Drag your mouse and make a careful selection of just the right strap on the gown. It should look something like this.
Now go to menu Edit/Assign/to material, highlight the default text and name it straps. The pop up windows work the same as the grouping ones so no problem there at all. Select the other side strap as well and add it to the straps material already created, by locating and selecting it, in the drop down list. How about adding some hem line different material as well? Make a rectangular selection throughout the bottom part of the gown, as wide as you wish and assign a new material called hemline. Now to menu Edit/Color/by material. It should look something like this.
Color your template black and white again and save the obj. Always remember if you replace an obj in the geometries with a new one, to delete the old rsr so the new one created will get all the new properties that you assigned to the mesh!
The possibilities of assigning materials are endless and depend on your taste and choices you may wish to assign a different color just to the abdomen of the dress, or a strip along the chest, it’s all up to you!
There are so many great poseable clothes out there and if you carry out this tutorial I’m sure you can fine-tune conforming all of them since the basics are the same!
I hope the above tutorial has enlightened you a bit of an easy and flexible way to expand your posette’s wardrobe with clothing you were considering so wrongly useless, unless she was standing straight up!
And that's not all imagine what you can do with a dull monochrome dxf plant or any other prop after you convert it to obj. You don't really need 3Dskills to achieve the perfect look for it.. You can assign different petal colors, another material for the leaves, an extra one for the stem and so on...isn’t it fun?
So fire up UVmapper and start experimenting!
