Poser 6, Lesson 3
To Dress a Figure
Lesson 2 dealt with conforming cloths. This lesson will deal with, among other things, dynamic cloths.
Conforming cloths are figures, with body parts that match a "person"'s body parts.
Dynamic Clothes
Dynamic cloths are props, with only one part, but which may have more than one material zone.
What a material zone is remains, as yet, unclear. Be patient, my friend, an explanation may yet emerge.
The text refers to something called a "model program" and indicates that such are outside the scope of either this lesson or this course. I need to follow up on this.
Dynamic cloths obey the laws of gravity, fold neatly and naturally around a person, regardless of the pose that person is assigned.
Introducing the Animation Feature
When Animation is first opened, it consists of 30 frames. In normal animation, 30 frames will play in one second. Is this the case with Poser-created animations?
It appears from the text that the illustration on Page 3 should have numbers, indicating the location of items explained in succeeding paragraphs. If so, those numbers are missing.
Key Framing
An additional problem: the text says "Hit the + sign". My initial reaction was to press the + key on my keyboard; an alternative is the click the + sign in the lower left of the screen. I first tried the keyboard; nothing seemed to happen, so I clicked the + sign; nothing seemed to happen.
The text indicates that AVI is the default for creating an animation. On my machine, AVI is not even an option: Quicktime is the default, with Image Files and Flash as the other two options. I chose Quicktime and clicked Make Movie.
An addition window, Compression Settings, displayed. Not knowing what to do, I left the defaults (Animation, Key Frame every 24 frames checked, Compressor Depth at Thousands of Colors, and Quality at Medium) and clicked OK.
A dialog box displayed, asking what to name the file and where to put it. I named it James.mov and put it in the proper folder for this lesson. I'm hoping to be able to insert the result below, but I'm not sure I know how to import an .mov file into this .html document, using Dreamweaver.
When you want to make an animation, DO NOT be in a hurry. It's taking about half an hour to process a 30-frame animation, this on a 2Ghz Intel Core 2 Duo with 1 GB 667 MHz DDR2 SDRAM. Hmmm … perhaps I ought to install the other 2 gig of RAM and see if that helps.
Making a dynamic cloth
The box prop called for in the lesson is in Props > Primitives. Please remember, sir, that you need to remember how to navigate around. This is a big area, and you will surely get lost if you don't learn where stuff is.
More navigation: Getting into the Cloth Room is accomplished by clicking on the Cloth tab at the top of the screen.
After you have created a new simulation, the Clothify button becomes active — and not until. This is important to remember.
When you're done with the Cloth Collision Objects window, you need to click the OK button. What a git!
Having clicked the Calculate Simulation button, I watch the square drape itself gracefully over the box. I return to the Pose Room, save the file, render the scene, and get this:
Dynamic Skirt
Twice now, we've loaded people into the scene and each time we've turned off her IK chains. Why?
Getting the prop involves File > Import, selecting what kind of prop (indicated by the extension, in this case .obj), then (in this case) turning off all the import options (another trip to the manual to learn what all those might have done), and clicking OK. The drop moves right to place.
Making this prop dynamic is done by following the directions in Making Cloth Dynamic, above.
Getting the vertices of the waist portion of the skirt was a challenge. This may become easier when I remember to take notes of what I did when I finally succeeded.
I may need to do this over, because I posed poor Katie right in the Cloth room. No, it seemed to work all right, but I hope to remember to return to the Pose room for posing. Here's the result.
Material Room
This part seemed to work fairly well, although I must have missed some of the vertices in the previous section, because the two materials are separated by a bit of Katie's midriff.
Playing with the Diffuse color (making it something other than white) seems to have taken some of the glare off that.
Here's the result:
The Assignment
I've added hair (Jessi's Pulled Back; getting that right was challenging—I resorted to changing the camera angle to make the problems), added a t shirt and tried (unsuccessfully, but you would have figured that out) to change the material on the skirt.
This time I selected the tshirt and was successful in applying a texture to it.
