HOW TO USE DYNAMIC CLOTHES IN POSER 5 OR HIGHER

Before we do anything else we need a dynamic clothing, right? Got one ready just here

If you wish to read this tutorial in spanish click here.

A little introduction is required to understand what's the dynamic clothing about. It is a piece of clothing that has no "bones", and therefore can't be conformed to a figure. It's exactly like a prop but, it can be used only in Poser's cloth room. Let's continue, install the cloth, open Poser and load V3 (because this dress is for V3). IT'S VERY IMPORTANT that your figure is all "zeroed", it is all the body parts set to 0, all the morphs set to 0 aswell and the IK chains unchecked before proceding


Next thing, load the clothing, as you can see in the image... what? Too sexy? Naaah!.It's important to check that the dress is parented to Vicky's hip, if that's not the case do it now on the object properties / set parent. The dynamic clothes don't work "as they are", we need to create a small animation. We are going to do a small 10 frames animation to adapt the dynamic to the figure's body. The animation length by default is 30, so we edit it by clicking on 30 and writing 10.


Go to frame 10 and pose Vicky...ooops! I've gone too far with the dial. THE SLOWER COMPUTERS can need more than 10 frames for the animation. In this case you'll need to extend the animation to 15 or 20 frames, not moving the figure in the first 5 or 10 frames to let the cloth adapt to the morphs and start the animation at that point.


Now the animation is complete. Again, Vicky must be completely set to 0 on frame 1, we then move to frame 10 and load the morphs and give her a pose. The cloth looks odd at this point but, don't worry, it's just as it has to be. Just a thing to take care... as you can see the left hand is touching the body and going through the cloth.


We must avoid this, so we move the hand out - later we'll correct the hand's position -.

With a little practice we'll learn how to pose the hand at the right distance for the clothing to fold around it, giving it quite a natural effect, but meanwhile hands out.

We then move the animation's timeline to 0 and we're ready to go to the cloth room


Click on the New Simulation button to enable the settings panel.


We write the start and end frames we're working with - in our case 1 and 10-, the kind of collision -the one selected is the fastest, go with this one unless it give you trouble-, and the draping frames, which is 10 by default. Click OK.


Next click clothify and select your clothing prop on, like in the image.


The next step is to establish the collision parameters clicking on Collide Against.


Clicking on Add/Remove opens the Hierarchy editor. We need to check all the body parts that we think will come into contact with the dress. The figure could even have more props attached like a belt or other conforming clothes, like a pair of boots. We should check all them too, if so.


It's time to enter all the other secondary parameters as you can see on the image. If the dress isn't going to touch the hands, the head or the feet, we tell Poser to ignore those collisions to save processing time. The dials produce little changes on the way the dress will conform to the body, right now we'll leave them as they are. The 'start draping from zero pose' option comes checked by default. Click OK

As you can see, there are some additional dials. They are exactly that, additional, if we turn them, we'll change the way the cloth will behave during the simulation. I think that the most spectacular is cloth density, which gives an impressive gravity effect to the clothes with high values. When you've done a few animations you'll be ready to play a bit with those dials, but for now we'll leave the default options.


We're done! Click on Calculate Simulation and leave the computer "cooking" for a while ... - first it calculates the draping, and then the animation that will take you to the result you were looking for- You'll see how the animation goes on, and at the end the result will be something like the image above. If at the end the result is not clear or it seems that the dress is not fitting tigh, move the timeline to 0 and then back to 10, so Poser "gets refreshed".


It is time to go back to the pose interface. As you can see it's not that bad at all. Now you can place the hand on its place. Don't worry, when you have practised more, you'll be able to place the dress between the hand and the body.


You can now render the image! A bit of hair, some prop....Ta-Daaa!

Some dynamic clothes are well modelled but not optimised for the Cloth Room, and may cause slowness or unexpected results. If you get a dynamic clothing item that gives you trouble, just skip it and try another.

Happy rendering!