How to Create Clothing With Poser Software

Series Summary

The 3-D rendering program Poser is popular with fine art and commercial artists, who use it to create realistic human and animal figures for everything from product packaging to magazine covers. The program is set up as a virtual studio with lights, backgrounds, props, and wardrobes. Although it is compatible with a number of other 3D animation programs, Poser has limited animation capabilities of its own. Users choose from a basic library of human, animal and robotic figures to build their files, as the program cannot model figures from scratch. Poser also includes a variety of stock poses, textures, hair pieces and facial expressions to be used with the figure. Many third party merchants sell similar content which expands the possibilities of Poser-created figures.

In this free series of rendering software lessons, you will learn how to create hair and clothing for your Poser figures. Our expert John Carstarphen demonstrates how to create clothes using the collision settings of this powerful program, then how to drape them on your characters. You will also learn how to create, grow and style hair to get exactly the appearance you are looking for. From buzz cut to mod to rasta, Poser can do it all.

Video Transcript

"JOHN CARSTARPHEN: Hi, this is John Carstarphen for Expert Village. Let's look at the dynamic Cloth Room in this tutorial where we're going to discuss the dynamic features of Poser and that includes cloth and hair. What we have set up here is a simple cloth animation. We have a dress draped over a model and as the model moves, the dress moves in physically, realistic ways. It creates wrinkles and curves around the body as the body moves. That's what dynamic animation is. It's animation that is physically realistic and calculates using real-world physics. It's a very complex kind of calculation, and so because of that it takes quite a bit of time even on a good computer to render a dynamic hair or cloth figure but sometimes the results are really worth it. And we're going to start by deleting the simulation that we currently have. And so, we have just a simple dress and it's attached to the figure but you can see the figure, there are parts of the figure poking through and the dress is not on correctly. From this point forward, it's just a matter of styling the hair and getting the hair to look the way you want to before you begin calculating the dynamics. So, to do that, we have a number of controls. We can adjust the hair length, the length variance and we'll begin doing that. So, the variance basically adds a bit of randomness. We'll make the hair a little bit shorter, and we can use the Pull Back tools and Pull Down and Pull Side. And then of course, there are some additional styling controls available and we'll click on Style Hairs and the hair style tool pops up. With this, we use the selector tool to isolate a group of hairs that we want to adjust. And once we select that group, yellow tips appear. Hi, this is John Carstarphen for Expert Village. Now, the Constrain Falloff will allow us to move our selection closer to the root or closer to the tip of the hair. And so, once we have the hair selected, we can begin translating, twisting, scaling, or otherwise moving just a small group of hairs or even one hair if we need to. And this is very useful when you get down to the fine details of styling. Hi, this is John Carstarphen for Expert Village. Now, human hair will tend to have a little bit of kink in it and that's one of the things that separates human hair from animal fur. And so--to add a bit more realism to your hair, you'll need to--just add a little bit of Kink Strength and Kink Scale to the hair as well as a bit of clumpiness because human hair is not all uniform and it's not all the same length. What happens with human hair, in fact, is that it is layered. And so, when you begin building your dynamic hair, one thing we've done here is we've just made one hair group. What you should probably do is just select a smaller area of scalp and begin building several hair groups, so let's try that. We're going to delete this growth group and then we're going to add a new growth group, we're going to edit that growth group and we're going to move in and select just a very small portion and then grow guide hairs out of that. Hi, this is John Carstarphen for Expert Village. And then what we would probably do from here is select yet another section that's right next to it and grow guide hairs from that. And well--of course, we'd have to--this new section would be a new growth group so we'd have to create a new growth group and then rename the growth group and so, typically you end up with--for a full head of human hair, you'll end up with as many as five or six or more different growth groups, each one layered on top of or underneath the other one. So, that you have a really nice layered effect and as you begin adjusting your growth groups the--of course, the top most group will be perhaps smaller than the one underneath it which will be a little bit longer, the one underneath that will be a little bit longer and so forth. And the other thing to remember about human hairs is that you can show the populated hairs here. You can show the actual number of hairs that will get rendered. And typically, human hair will require density of about 5000 or so to really have an effect of looking head of human hair. Right now, the hair density is pretty low but this can go up quite substantially so just remember that the more you increase this, of course the longer the render times."