Serious and Organised / Men of Action / The ABC System: system written needs play testing.

Arædan: Originally called Untitled Fantasy #1. In need of editing.

The Seer: About 50% written and waiting for me to go back to it.

Fairy Tale Noir: Heading on towards the 40,000 word mark with no sign of ending till it’s at least 50,000. A little longer than the 15,000 I was aiming for. May do a second draft to try to kick it up to 100,000+ and call it a novel.

impworks logo: Done and in use.

impworks website: Live since last year and growing. Recoded into Smarty templates almost as soon as I finished the first version. Some stuff (mostly pictures, scripts and tutorials to add when I find time).

Vue Python scripts: I’ve produced a growing list of free Vue Python scripts.

STEEPVM: Turned into a wednesday night post sequence instead of an article.

Characters on the Couch: Serialised here too.

Vue: Vue 6 is a huge leap forward in making my pictures look like I want them to. The new spectral sky model is worth the upgrade alone as far as I’m concerned.

Poser 7: Using it pretty much like Poser 5 and 6 at the moment need to dig into the enhancements.

Xfrog: Got a working copy again and now I’m back to exploring making abstracts with it.

Virtual Fashion: Starting to get good results from this especially when textured elsewhere.

Pepakura Designer: Need to find more time to play with this.

Blogs: This one is well established. The Vue News Blog is getting growing readership. I’ve a couple more in the pipe line too for specialist topics.

Underwater Secret Base: Redesigned to include obligatory volcano.

Well after much fiddling I’ve produced my first complete dynamic cloth garment for Poser. Originally shaped in Virtual Fashion I textured it in Deep Paint 3D and Paint Shop Pro before taking it into Poser where I ran a simple cloth simulation so it has a bit more of a drape to it. Finally rendered in Vue 6. Modelled after garments that appear in The 13th Warrior and other films of a similar period. According to one Wikipedia entry, along with various clones of that article on other sites, is called a Gurgel but I can’t find any other reference to it by that name but for now it will do. Its been a long time since I modelled and textured anything in this kind of process and it reminded me how greatful I am that there is so much good content at reasonable prices these days. Tomorrow I’m going to tackle the somewhat more complex texturing of the shirt and trousers to go with it.

I’ve also tried my hand at conforming clothing. However my results both manually and using OBJ2CR2 File Convertor are so far not as good as my results with dynamic clothing.

Hopefully at the end of the process I’ll be able to achieve my aim that is to be able to make historically accurate clothing for Daz‘s Michael and Victoria.

Downloaded the new version of Virtual Fashion. It now supports the Daz Millenium figures and seems to be a lot more reliable. Only clothes I’ve made with it that didn’t work had very thin cuts or slits.

I don’t need the help of a saboteur extraordinary to slow the process of government down rather that of industry and in particular computer graphics companies. Most of the stuff I regularly use has had significant new releases in the last two months. First was Vue 6 Infinite then PePaKuRa 2, Daz’s Victoria 4, Virtual Fashion Professional 1.5 and Poser 7. Getting back into XFrog 3.5 as well. On the horizon is the behamothic figure of the next version of MS Windows. New versions are great but trying to keep on top of and learn all the new, cool stuff can start to feel a bit daunting. I’ve yet to get Virtual Fashion Professional 1.5 and Poser 7 just so I can catch up with the other ones first.

One update is coming in very handy with all this though. My broadband doubled in speed last week. Thats one update I’d prefer Jorj not saboutage.

So I was glad that after that marathon effort I updated Virual Fashion without any difficulty. I’ve only played a little bit but so far the types of design that crashed it seem to be a thing of the past. Now I just need the talent to actually make something that looks passable.

Cloth Control Settings for Virtual Fashion

Dynamic Cloth Controls in Poser 6

Poser 6 Cloth Simulation Settings for Poser 6

The key things I’ve found to get a fast simulation are:

• Make the item bigger than the model you want to fit it to so there is a gap between the figure and the virtual fashion figure.
• Scale the character down in the first frame and then scale them up till they fit the outfit. In the above example Victoria is scaled to 83% normal size on the x and z scales in the first frame and scaled up to 100% by frame 30.
• No poke through in the keyframes you set up to do the fitting.
• No thin cuts running through the fabric (eg slit up the side of a dress).
• Simple smooth animation not running too fast.

Virtual Fashion Test Animation (152Kbyte DivX)

I picked up Virtual Fashion Basic for Poser yesterday. I’d only ever really experimented a tiny bit with the cloth room in poser before and I’m certainly no expert. My initial experiments have had mixed results. I am starting to learn a few important lessons though. Avoid fine detail, size the cloth a bit on the baggy side and so the cloth simulation doesn’t take days to calculate play with the settings in Poser.

I’ve also found it isn’t difficult to fit the outfits made for the default Poser figures VF is designed for to Daz’s Millenium figures. All you need to do is start out with the figure scaled down so they fit inside the clothing on the first frame of the simulation and then scale them up to the proper dimensions by the end. Tonight’s picture is Victoria 3 textured using SkinVue2 and wearing a dress that took about five minutes to knock together in VF all rendered in Vue 5 Infinite.