How to Create Virtual Model Clothes

One of the coolest things on the Internet right now are virtual models. There are several programs, such as Poser, that can provide you with good pre-made figures and pre-made clothes for those figures. But you can also make your own. This is especially handy if you want to use the Poser Cloth Room. The Poser Cloth Room allows you to simulate the way cloth behaves naturally in the presence of gravity, friction, wind and so on. The following steps will show you how to make a basic piece of dynamic clothing for Poser using Hexagon. In this case we will make a skirt.

Things You'll Need

• Poser Hexagon

Instructions

Directions

1. Open Poser, and load a figure. Then export that figure as a OBJ Wavefront file.

2. 

   Import your template into Hexagon. increase the size ratio to 100. Once the model is in, go to the scene tree and delete any parts you don't need. For instance, since this will be a skirt, delete the head chest, feet and so on. Then highlight all the remaining parts, go to Utilities, and click Weld. This will create a single object in the scene tree, which will make scene management easier.

3. 

   Go to the properties Panel, and change the x and z coordinates to zero. Now change the View to Front. The go to the Primitive tab, click on the cylinder, and create one on the screen about where the skirt would go. Go to the Properties Panel, and make the mesh fairly dense, since this is necessary when later actually using cloth dynamics in Poser. Again, make sure you reset the x and z coordinates for the skirt to zero. Keep in mind that for all dynamic clothing, you want to have only one layer. Multiple layers will fail in the Poser cloth dynamics simulation.

4. 

   Change the view back to Perspective. Change the Selection Icon to Edge, select the top edges of the skirt, and then click "L." This will select the entire loop of that edge around the skirt. Now use the scaling function of the universal manipulator tool to scale the selection down. Stop before any part of it intersects the girl template.

5. 

   Repeat step 4 with each loop of edges until you get to the bottom of the skirt. If there are any unnatural indentations where you have followed the shape of the template too closely, go back and reselect that loop and adjust the size to produce a smooth flowing skirt.

6. 

   Rotate the view using the Rotate control at the bottom, and you will see that although we now have the width right, the skirt does not fit properly in other areas. Select the top loop edges again. We are going to tighten the "belt" area, since this is the most important part of a dynamic skirt. The other areas will naturally fall into place during the simulation, but this area will be constrained, holding the skirt on the figure. So it has to be right.

7. 

   Use the Universal Manipulator tool to resize and reposition the edge in only the z direction. You can also resize in the x direction, but do not reposition. Again, do let let the edge intersect with the template figure. Then do the same thing with the second layer of edges.

8. Delete the template from the scene tree. Now go to File, and click export. Save the skirt as a OBJ Wavefront file. And there you have it. You now have a dynamic skirt that can be imported into Poser and applied to the figure you based it on for use in the Cloth Dynamics room. The "puffed" out areas of the skirt that are not a part of the belt area you will constrain will fall naturally during the simulation.