Cutting Clothes in UV Mapper for Poser, pt II
When last we left our intrepid heroes ...
Okay. I hope you've got a big cup of tea, because part II is ready. First we'll do some text hacking, then we'll do lots of tweaking. (And maybe a few shots of tequila.)
Go into your :Runtime:libraries:character folder and find a similar piece of clothing to what you're making. I used the .cr2 from a shirt I downloaded. It's okay to modify and distribute the .cr2 if there's no morph information in it because that is just the minimum information that Poser needs to use the item. It's generic information. If you don't have a suitable piece of clothing, you can use the character .cr2 itself.
Note: you can NOT use the regular Vicki 2.cr2 file (or Mike 2.cr2, Stephanie.cr2 or Aiko.cr2) if you are going to redistribute the clothing you've made. Those contain proprietary morph information! To make it easier, I've included a generic .cr2 shirt. You can find it in the :Runtime:libraries:character:Cres-Tutorial folder.
Open up the .cr2 in a text editor. Wordpad is *not* recommended. There's a lot of free or cheap text editors out there. I use Textpad. (It's not free, but it's cheap and it has cool features.)
First, do a Search/Replace on the object name/location. In my case:
Find :Runtime:Geometries:Crescent:generic-top.obj
Replace with :Runtime:Geometries:Crescent:v2-tutorial-top.obj
You should find/replace it twice.
Scroll down to the bottom of the file. You should see several material blocks such as:
material Preview
{
KdColor .3 .3 .3 1
KaColor 0 0 0 1
KsColor .3 .3 .3 1
TextureColor 1 1 1 1
NsExponent 30
tMin 0
tMax 0
tExpo 0.6
bumpStrength 1
ksIgnoreTexture 0
reflectThruLights 1
reflectThruKd 0
textureMap NO_MAP
bumpMap NO_MAP
reflectionMap NO_MAP
transparencyMap NO_MAP
ReflectionColor 1 1 1 1
reflectionStrength 1
}
Delete all those sections except for the material Preview block. When you bring in the object, Poser will automatically add in the extra materials. If you want to get fancy, you can set default colors for them later. If you have P5, you may see a huge amount of material information in the blocks. All you really need is the material Preview block. P5 will rebuild the other information, and P4 and PPP can't read it, so there's no need to keep it in. If you leave any other material blocks in, you may end up with extra materials on your object that don't do anything.
Tip: If you want to get fancy and have your clothing load into Poser with a name, go to the bottom of the file by the Material section and look for the following:
figure
{
name Generic
Change the name line to whatever name you want to use.
Now that you've hacked the .cr2 file, it's time to save it. Save it in the appropriate folder (such as :Runtime:libraries:character:vic-clothes), but save it as v2-tutorial-top-test.cr2 (or whatever you want, but it's your responsibility to remember the name.) ;-)
Tip: I end the .cr2 file with -test so when I'm finished, I know exactly which file to delete from my library.
Time to open up Poser.
Load up Vicki (or Judy, or Posette if you're really determined.)
Go to the folder that you saved the top and hit the double checkmark to add the top to the scene. (It will have a shrugging guy. Don't worry, we'll get rid of him later.)
Conform the figure to Vicki.
Now, if we're really lucky, we're done. (That rarely happens. If it does happen, go out and buy a lottery ticket right away!)
Move Vicki around; try different poses. Chances are, she'll pop her top. (Mine did.)
Here's why - the top wasn't cut properly. On the left is where the chest should be cut, on the right is where I cut it. (Photoshop enhanced. Normally, all you'll see are white outlines.)
(If you thought you'd get it right by copying my work, no such luck! I goofed on purpose, just to catch any cheaters.) ;-)
Time to go back to UV Mapper and start tweaking.
I keep Poser open and I switch back and forth between UV Mapper and Poser to see where Vicki's groups are compared to mine.
In my case, I'm going to start by hiding everything but the chest. My chest is too big (insert jokes here), so I'm going to select some polygons on each side and assign them to the appropriate Collars.
The next thing I'll do is hide the chest, then select and unhide the abdomen. I'll select some polygons on each side and assign them to the chest.
Doing some more checking, I see that most of the hip actually belongs to the abdomen, so I'll select the area that should go to the hip and hide it. I'll then select the rest of the polygons and assign them to the abdomen.
I have some other areas to tweak, but this gives a good idea, I hope, on how to efficiently fix the problem areas. After I tweak the top, I'll save it again under the same name.
If you're in Poser 4, you need to do things the hard way. Delete the top and save your scene. (It saves a step.) Go to the folder that you saved your .obj file in, and delete the corresponding .rsr file. You may need to close Poser entirely to delete the .rsr.
Poser 4 creates a copy of the .obj file, so when you regroup and resave the object, P4 ignores it. (How sweet!) That's why you have to delete the .rsr. You'll probably need to close Poser because it has the .rsr locked. Saving the scene means you can start back up slightly quicker.
PPP and P5 do not use .rsr files so you can ignore this part.
Time to save the model again and see how it works in Poser. Keep saving and testing until you're satisfied with the results. (Again, in P4, you'll have to keep deleting the .rsr file between saves.) Hopefully you won't find a problem with your mesh once you've finally finished the conforming like I did. (But that's what making morphs and hiding them are for!) ;-)
Once you're happy with it, save it to the library as v2-top (or whatever you want to call it.) I prefer to go and add some colors to the material settings before I save just so it doesn't use the weird colors Poser picks. (You can go and delete the old .cr2 file when you have time.)
Are we done?
Well, not if you want a good texture map for people to use.
Page 3, I hear you moan.