Grouping Tool: Adding a new material to clothes

One of the most powerful things you can do with the grouping tool is add new material zones to clothes. This is probably the easiest way to modify your existing collection of cloths to produce

Fig 1: Jessi's Little Gray Dress

In this tutorial we will use Jessi's conforming gray dress (seen here shaded green). In this model all of the skirt element is a single 'hip' body part, making it much easier for us to manipulate with the grouping tool.

Fig 2: Selecting the bottom six rows

1. Select the hip
2. Select the grouping tool
3. Select a display mode that will show you the polygons - I prefer Hidden Line (Ctrl-4 on PC)
4. Select 'New Group' and give your new group a suitable name
5. Highlight the polygons that you want to be part of your new material - here we are selecting the bottom six rows of squares. Rotate your figure to make sure that you have selected every poly all the way round the figure.
6. Select 'Assign Material' and give your new material a suitable name (I used 'hem').
7. Close the grouping tool. Your new material will now appear.
8. Save the modified figure to your figure library using a new name - that way the original version is not damaged.

Fig 3: Altering the length

You can use your new material in a variety of different way. Possibly the simplest is to make it invisible (fully transparent, no highlights). This way you can alter the basic shape of the garment. Here I have used that method to shorten the dress.

Fig 4: Adding detail

Alternatively you can use a new material to get a more complex result. Here, I have changed the colour to blue, used a noise node to get some transparency, and used negative displacement to create the impression of layered clothing (to get negative displacement, create a simple maths node, set value1 to your negative number (-0.4 here) and attach to the displacement input. Don't forget to turn displacement on in your render options.

Fig 5: Select the first section

In many cases you will want to create a new material that spans several different body parts in the clothing figure. Here, we are going to add a stripe down the front of Jessi's dress, running through the chest and abdomen. Select the first body part to be modified, and create your new material as above.

Fig 6: Select the second section

Once you are happy with your first selection, it is time to move on to the tricky bit. When you move on to the next body part, your original select will disappear, making it rather harder to match up your selections (see figure 6).

There is one way to avoid this. Transparent materials appear as a lighter shade of gray in the grouping tool, regardless of the amount of transparency. After you have created your new material in the first body part, go to the material room. Look at the original surrounding material. If it is solid, then make your new material transparent. If the original material is transparent, make sure your new material is solid. That way, the new material will be visible in one body part as you work on it in another.

Make your new material in this second body part in the same way as in the first, until you reach the point when you are about to assign a material. In Poser 5 you will need to type in the exact same name you used on the first part. In Poser 6, you can select your new material from a drop-down list (material names need to match between body parts, group names do not).

Fig 7: The Final Result

Using these techniques you can increase the flexibility of just about every item in your poser clothes library.