Grouping Tool: Add a new material to a figure

In this tutorial we are going to look at how you can add a new material zone to a figure, using whole body parts only. In this case, we are going to create a new 'glove' material that covers the hand, fingers and thumb body parts.

The grouping tool allows us to very quickly assign a new material to any body part, without even needing to create a new group.

1. Zoom in on the hand - the easiest way to do this will be to switch to the right or left hand camera.
2. Select one of the body parts you wish to alter - in this case, we will start with the hand.
3. Select the grouping tool. The hand will light up in red. Every polygon in the hand is now selected.
4. Click on the Assign Material button.
5. Type in the name of your new material (I used 'gloves')

Fig 1: First group selected

At this point the main part of the hand will now use your new material. However, the fingers will not (figure 1).

1. Still in the grouping tool, select each finger joint in turn (15 in total for Jessi)
2. Click on Assign Material and pick your new material off the list (or type in the same name in Poser 5)
3. Repeat for each joint of each finger.

At this point, save your modified figure to the figure library. Don't override the original version, as the new 'gloves' material will not be affected by material collections or mat poses.

The final step is to set up our new material in the material room. Here, I have used a very simple displacement based material to produce my glove.

1. Create a Noise node.
2. Set the minimum value of the noise node to 0.9
3. Plug the output from the noise node into the displacement input.
4. Set the displacement value to 0.008 (one tenth of the normal value).
5. Render with displacement turned on.

Fig 2: Glove made using Grouping tool and displacement

There are all sorts of uses for this technique. Create a new 'legs' material to give you easy stockings.