I've been going through various "school uniform" items I'll be using for a project to see how various items fit and how well they adapt to S-16 (2019)'s rigging. I've been using Poser's "copy joint zones from" menu command on blouses, jackets, shoes, and socks, and the S-16 "copy joint centers" pose file on skirts, and for the most part that's all it takes to get a good fit.

But a few blouse items are not cooperating, esp. around the shoulders, and I haven't yet figured out why. The problems happen when I use S-16's Easy Pose arm dials (which I LOVE, BTW!), so I'm thinking maybe some clothing items just can't adapt to the way S-16's shoulders and collars are working together? I get two kinds of issues: (1) pokethrough at the top outer edge of the shoulder; and (2) crumpling of the mesh along the top of the shoulder and into the collar of the blouse. The first type happens on nearly all of the blouses I have by 3DAge, but I found it easy enough to make "loosen" morphs, and then I discovered I can also fix it by going to the blouse's collar actor and dialing in a bit of bend.

The second type I have yet to find a solution for. I tried messing around with the Joint Editor, thinking that maybe I needed to shrink the collar bend weightmap on the blouse so that arm up/down woudln't reach all the way into the blouse's collar, but I think I just made things worse b/c I don't really understand what's going on.

I initially came across the seocnd type of issue when I tried to re-model and then rig a "school girl" blouse from the old figure, Maya Doll. I tried various ways of grouping (manually, auto) and of rigging (Fitting Room, OBJ2CR2, Setup Room), and every method produced the same result of a lifted arm basically crushing the blouse's collar. So I figured I'd done something wrong in the process, until I came avross a blouse for V4 that did the same thing.

So that left me wondering: what is the best way to model and rig clothing for S-16 (whether the mesh is created from scratch, repurposed from another figure, or a V4 item that needs fixing)?

For example, do you model and rig to the "original" V4 and only apply S-16's rig (joint zones) when you're ready to conform the clothing item to an S-16 figure? Or would it be better to model and rig directly to the S-16 figure instead (using a base S-16 as a "donor" rig in the Setup Room or as the base in the Fitting Room)?

To what extent might you need to modify the S-16 weightmaps once they've been applied to a clothing item, and how do you figure out what/how to modify?

I'm asking as someone who wants to figure out how to make a few of her own clothing items work better with Karina's fantasticaly useful S-16 version of V4, not as someone who plans to offer V4 clothes for sale!

Thank you, Karina! This definitely helps.

I've gotten pretty comfortable with adjusting falloff zones with the Joint Editor, but I haven't really messed much with weight maps and I don't even know what bulge maps are for, although I can make a guess based on their name :-) So I think I just need to do some experiments with editing the bulge maps and/or replacing a weight map to get a feel for how they work. I've used Poser's "weight painting" tools in other contexts, particularly the Fitting Room but also on Magnets I was using to make morphs, but in those contexts precision isn't super important, whereas I suspect it is so with joints.

BTW, I finally got the MayaDoll schoolgirl shirt to work before I read your reply, but your reply gives me a clue as to why my last attempt worked, and it's not what I thought it was. For the last attempt, I loaded the V4 Developer Rig and the shirt OBJ and used the Fitting Room to fit the shirt to the Dev Rig. I saved the shirt as a figure and let Poser auto-group it. When I tried out the shirt in a fresh scene and copied my S-16 starter's joint zones into it, it worked reasonably well (far better than it had been), so I figured I'd finally hit on the right combo of steps.

But then you mentioned that the "further away from the figure body mesh the clothing is, the more inaccurate it becomes," and I realized what actually must've made the difference. In this last attempt, I let the Fitting Room run just a smidge of "Tighten" on the shirt, thus moving the clothing mesh closer to the figure's body. What I like so much about the MD schoolgirl shirt is that it ISN'T form fitting and in fact has a loose, almost baggy cut. For my teenage characters who like to wear baggy clothes, that's the kind of uniform shirt they'd choose. But I can now see the problem with clothing items that are too baggy!

I was wanting to make a boxy school blazer for the girls to wear (probably from an M4 suit jacket), b/c all the blazers I have or have seen are ridiculously form fitting. But now I'm thinking I'll have to work out a solution for clothes that are meant to be pretty far from the body.

One more thing: when I use an S-16 figure as the "donor" rig in the Fitting or Setup rooms, the clothing item acquires ALL the parameter info and groups from the S-16 figure, which is not ideal (given how tedious it is to delete parameter dial groups manually). I suppose I could strip all of that out of an S-16 and save it as an "S-16 dev rig"? Are there any of your custom morphs for S-16 that would be particularly useful to also have in clothing? I don't usually copy V4's FBMs into clothing b/c the only body changes I make in different characters are based on scaling, but I only just thought to wonder about the custom morphs.

I am working on creating some wardrobe items for Sasha-16 (2019) to help with promotion. I am new to the process but have successfully modeled some conforming garments in Blender 2.8 and have added the morphs for Sasha-16 in the Poser setup room. The clothes have material zones, but I still need to learn UV mapping for the textures before I can distribute usable freebie items.

Would a Sasha (2019) mannequin be better to model around? I have been using an .OBJ of sasha-16 exported out of Poser and it seems to work well so far.

Thanks for your efforts Karina! Especially for marching on despite the roadblocks of life and CPU hardware :)

emjay247

What you're describing sounds like the "developer's rig" CR2 that often comes with figures. The one that came with V4 references a V4 geometry w/o head or feet, but the CR2 contains all the rigging info and basic morphs you might want to have in a clothing item. I use the "dev rig" as the "donor" when rigging a clothing item via the Setup Room, and I've also used it as the "base" in the Fitting Room.

The main advantage is that it has only the essentials, so I can just let Poser copy all the morphs into the clothing, whereas with a regular V4 (or S-16) as the "donor," I'd have to wade through lots of morphs to choose the ones I want to put into the clothes. If I later want to copy specific S-16 or V4 morph package morphs into the clothing, I can do that using Poser's "Copy Morphs From" command -- although I don't always know which morphs actually need to go into clothing for a better fit and which ones don't.

I have in the past used a Sasha-16 CR2 as the "donor rig" in the Setup room and as a "base" in the Fitting Room, but when I do that, the clothing inherits every aspect of Sasha-16's parameter dials, including all the extra dial groups that are there for info or organization only. Then it's kind of confusing to select the clothing item and see a parameter panel that looks almost exactly like that of the figure wearing the clothing!

I've thought about making a stripped-down version of a Sasha-16 base to serve as a "donor" for rigging clothing, with the extra parameter groups removed along with any morphs that shouldn't transfer into clothing -- except that I don't know which ones those are! Karina, is that what you're thinking of making when you refer to a "mannequin"? Basically a "dev rig" customized for the Sasha-16 version of V4? I think that would be handy to have, since you're probably the only one who really understands which parts of Sasha-16 might be useful to have in clothing and which parts might not!

Part of what prompted me to make the first post in this thread was that I wasn't sure if it was better to model clothing around the original V4 mesh or around an S-16 figure exported as an OBJ. Karina pointed out that they're the same, but I think that would only be true if you loaded S-16 and didn't apply any of the extra features included with her -- and in that case, why not just model around the original V4 mesh instead?

When I was trying to re-model a shirt, I first exported an OBJ of my base S-16 figure and brought that into my modeler. But later I decided to also load the original V4 OBJ just to make sure they're the same, and I discovered a few small differences, esp. in the upper chest/under arms area, where the S-16 export was fuller and wider than the original V4 mesh.

I'm guessing that when you export an S-16 mesh, you're getting the shape as it's been improved by Karina's weight mapping and other fixes that were applied via the CR2, rather than the shape as in the original OBJ (without the influence of a CR2). And if you're going to be copying S-16 joint zones into the clothing item once you've got it rigged and conformed on a character, then it seems like it would be better to use the original V4 OBJ as the "tailor's dummy" for clothing, so that you don't end up with a double-dose of the S-16 improvements.

At least, I'm pretty sure that's what was happening with a shirt that was giving me trouble, and the trouble went away when I switched to using the original V4 OBJ as the target base. Hope that makes sense!

Zitat von Karina im Beitrag #9

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Hello @Perpetualrevision:
I must look deeper into the issue, so have some patience with me please.
I'll see what I can do.

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Here are some items that I modeled around the Sasha-16 mesh. I did notice that it seems a little tighter when conformed to V4 in a POSER scene. I'm still learning how to prepare quality CR2 files for distribution in hopes of promoting this awesome figure. I'm thinking of calling them Sasha Basics but would like Karina' blessing before settling on it. I've got another name chosen if it is needed.

That's a great idea... it seems like all of the attention is on La Femme right now, and people are not giving Sasha the attention she deserves. A nice wardobe pack would probably be a nice reminder that S16 is also out there and V4 isn't dead yet.

BTW, I ended up setting up my own S-16 "donor rig" and it works great. I imported the V4 DevSuit OBJ (that comes with V4) into Poser and used the Setup Room to rig it using my S16 base CR2.

I transferred only the bones I'd need for clothing and only the main Morphs++ FBMs, since I rarely use anything else to shape a body (other than S16's scaling and "true height" dials, which don't need to be copied into clothing).

Then I went through all the parameters panels on the newly rigged S16DevSuit and deleted all the stuff specific to the S16 figure and organized everything the way I'd want it to appear on any newly rigged clothing item. And then I saved that to the figures library as my "S16 Donor Rig."

I've used it quite a few times in the process of making a custom schoolgirl shirt and skirt as well as modifying some clothes made for other figures, and it works great!

I bring the "S16 Donor Rig" into my modeling app (Cheetah3D) and use it as the "tailor's dummy" to model around, and I've discovered something kinda interesting: clothing I make or modify this way and then rig using the S16 Donor Rig seems to fit S16 much better than clothes that were made for the standard V4, particularly in the area where the upper thighs meet the hips. I've made tons of "fix morphs" for that area in various pants and skirts I've bought, but I've never had to do that for an item I made or modified myself. Not sure why, but it kinda makes me want to try making even more things!