Change obj in Hex or add an extra bone in cr2?

SlimerJSpud

Somewhat new to Hex, so bear with me. Background: I processed the Harem Dancer V3 through Clothes Converter 4.0 (CC), which was probably a huge mistake, in retrospect. The pants are billowy with lots of folds, which drove CC berzerk. I managed to repair the mesh in Hex, but there was one item that I missed when running the Clothes Converter. It has a box to check to convert Buttocks to Hip when converting V3 to V4. I missed that. The obj has some straps that go around the lower hip area that are not in the cr2 that came from CC. Look at the main promo for the HD V3 outfit. It's the version on the left (or far right) with the straps. The upper ones are part of Hip, but the lower ones are part of lButtock, rButtock. These straps do not show up when I load the cr2 in DS.

From this nearby thread, it looks like I can just rename the lButtock and rButtock to Hip and export back to obj, and I will have these extra straps on the hip. The question is, what if I want to turn them off to make them invisible? They are part of the same UV, so there will only be one material zone. Is there a way to make them an extra bone in the cr2? I could just have 2 versions of the obj, and make a simple edit to a copy of the cr2 to point to the alternate obj.

I'm using DS3 and V4, so please bear that in mind and thanks for any suggestions.

Morkonan

You can't add an extra bone in-between the hip and _thigh bones. If you interrupt the parent-child rigging relationship like that, it'll bork up. Rigging in Poser must match Groups in the object and for a conforming piece of clothing, the rigging of the clothing must match the parent-child relationships between the bones in the rigging of the intended figure. Else... it'll bork up. :)

But, you can add extra bones to a conforming clothing object, as long as they are not added in such a way as to re-order the rigging so it doesn't match up properly with the rigging of the base figure. For instance, you could do this:

1) Regroup those "buttock" groups into l_strap and r_strap groups, making sure that there is still a parent-child relationship from the "hip" to "l_thigh" and "r_thigh" that can be traced, through the geometry's group names. (IOW - If there is still geometry there named l_thigh and r_thigh and your new "strap" groups don't interrupt a path from "hip" to "thigh" groups, you shouldn't encounter any issues with grouping problems.)

2) Add two bones coming directly off of the hip group and name the one on the left "l_strap" and the one on the right "r_ strap." (The same, exact, names of the new groups you made.) Now, you can control these groups and make the straps bounce around, if you want, or you can hide them by simply selecting the bone and choosing it to be "invisible" without having to make any Material room changes.

(I do not know your work flow. But, the above method requires you to rig the object manually. If you are rigging automatically, using an outside program, and that program will not add user-defined bones, you'll have to rig it manually in order to get those extra bones in there.)

What you can also do, however, is assign these regions to a different material zone. You don't have to actually change the UV at all, just the Material Group for those faces. By doing that, you can order those faces to be transparent at will in the Material room. However, you can only create Material zones by faces, so that may not yield, for instance, a nice smooth line when you order those faces to be transparent in the Material Room. For that, you might need to create a high resolution transparency map for the material.

"Material Zones" and "UV Maps" are different things. A UVMap provides a way to place a two dimensional texture on a three dimensional object. A Material Zone refers to specific object faces and tells the program what materials should be used on those faces.

They are similar in the aspect that they are organized by faces. But, each Group (Capital "G") in an object or a multigrouped object has only one UVMap, while any face at all on an object can have its own, separate, Material zone. A multi-grouped object can have any number of UVMaps, limited by the number of groups, and any number of Material zones, limited only by the absolute number of faces. You could, if you wanted to go nuts, have 50,000+ Material Zones for V4, with each separate face having its own Material zone. :) Material zones can span UVMap and Groups. For instance, in V4, the "Torso" Material Zone extends through the Chest, Abdomen, Hip and only part of the Thigh groups. The rest of the Thigh Group is covered by the Legs Material Zone.

It doesn't matter if the object only has one, single, UV Map or multiple UV Maps. In Poser (And DS, AFAIK, but I'm not familiar with it) it can have as many Material Zones as it has faces.

(Note: It may be simpler for you just to use CC "correctly" and be sure to check that box so it converts well. I used that program years ago, different iteration, and it worked reasonably well. It probably borked up because of having trouble trying to figure out things without that "convert to hips" box being checked.)

SlimerJSpud

Some good info there, thanks. The bigest mesh problem CC had on the V3 Harem Dancer was closer to the shins than the hips, so I doubt checking the convert to hips box would make for a perfect conversion. This outfit has a lot of bits of mesh that overlap each other. This drives the CC right round the bend, as the Brits would say. re-running CC means fixing all those mashed vertices again. I've converted a few other clothing items with CC that worked a lot better. The Harem Dancer is an extreme case.

I used the trick in that other thread of just renaming the strap groups, and it worked. The rigging isn't perfect, but I can play with that. Extreme leg poses do bork it up. I made 2 versions of the obj using Hex. The one without the straps works.

Is there a way in DS3 or Hex to assign selected surfaces to a different material zone?

mjc1016

Hex, yes...

DS3...no.

SlimerJSpud

mjc1016 said:

Hex, yes...

DS3...no.

OK, more learning to do in Hex.