DressMe Version 1.0 (Windows only for the moment):
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What this plugin does:
Makes a figure "wear" clothes. You can create a wardrobe of clothes for your figure, and easily swap them.
Not only clothes:

Wigs
Shoes
Heads
Body Parts

Any model that needs to follow another model closely.

Before:
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After:
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How to install:
1. Unzip DressMe.hxt from the zip file.
2. Exit A:M.
3. Place DressMe.hxt in the Hash hxt folder. This will probably be C:\Program Files\Hash Inc\V15.0\hxt on Windows.
4. Start A:M.

How to use it:
1. Place a figure and an article of clothing in a choreography
2. Pose the figure.
3. Right click the clothing model in either the PWS or the viewport, and left click Plug-ins > DressMe.
4. Choose the figure to wear the clothing from the list
5. Click OK
The clothing will then jump onto the figure, and move with it.
You can create your own choreography action on the clothing if you want it to sway in the wind.
Some "poke-through" is inevitable, but can easily be fixed after final posing in muscle mode.
I recommend you click the hand icon next to the clothing model, to prevent accidental selection of the clothes when posing the figure.

Technical details
This is a very simple plugin.
A new choreography action is created for the clothing called DressMe using Blend Mode “Blend”.
The clothing should have been rigged with the same geometry bones as the figure. The plugin goes through each clothing bone, creates both an Orient-Like constraint and a Translate-To constraint for each bone, and sets the figure’s equivalent bone as the constraint’s target.
To remove the clothing, delete the choreography action DressMe.

Depending on the models involved, this will be most useful for single images rather than animation, due to the amount of "poke-through" you may get.

Learning A:M

I have found that making clothes for characters is a fantastic, satisfying way of learning A:M.

1. Learn simple Modelling
2. Learn simple Rigging - the underlying figure has the complex rigging.
3. Try out Control Point Weighting, Smart Skin
4. Manage Libraries
5. Learn Decalling on a simple model

Over the next few weeks I will be creating extra clothing for Gala, and possibly even re-rigging her in TSM, so that clothes made for her could be made to fit other characters with TSM installed.

Would anybody be interested in a "workshop" where I rig and show development as I go along?

There aren't many tutorials for TSM, and it might be useful to have a start to finish character.

I would love to have help from the experts as I go along, as my CP Weighting / Fan Bones abilities are slight.

Clothing to try.

This project contains a Tee Shirt and TSM rigged Thom (no CP Weighting or Smartskin)

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Gala and Clothing Package:

This file contains:
GalaDM1 - a figure to dress.
GalaDM1Wig - hair with pose slider to change from plain black to decalled brown hair
GalaDM1Lingerie - lingerie - being such a tight item, the problem of "pokethrough" is noticeable. I think it could probably be fixed with smartskin. This item is designed to have multiple decals added to it, and changed through poses, like the wig.
GalaDM1Dress - dress with some smartskin on the legs.

Click to view attachment
The original beautiful Gala is included in the A:M v15.0 subscription download available at ftp://ftp.hash.com/pub/misc/Data.zip.

Please regard these as a Work In Progress - I need to establish a method of creating and organizing clothing, and this will take a few iterations….. (And I am very slow at making things )

Create your own clothing

How to create Thom’s basic Tee is described in this pdf. (No decalling or smartskinning.) Hard to make, easy to reuse.

Click to view attachment

What the!!!!!!??????
Am I still asleep and dreaming?
It seems so real though.

My goodness gracious Caroline ! look what you've been up to. This is sooo coool, thank you....

This is great! Definitely useful for me. Thank you.

It may be possible to use Steffen's "Resurface" plugin to form fit the clothing to the character model.

This is a nice tool to add to the box ,well done Caroline and many thank's it work's a treat

Mega Kudos! The "workshop would be welcome". Nicely,nicely done, Caroline

So after you model the clothes, you rig them? And then the plug-in conforms the clothing model to the figure model?

Just read the PDF. This is AWESOME! it's like having Poser's conforming clothing in A:M!! This is a dream come true... Kudos Caroline!

Thanks all - your response made me very happy.

Rigging in TSM workshop is here:
http://www.hash.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=32815&hl=

I'm hoping this is the first step towards getting useable wardrobes.

Caroline- 2 things...

1- AWESOME WORK! This is a great plug-in, didn't know you were a programmer... I haven't had chance to use it yet but look forward to it!

2- If the 'Poser' crowd gets a sniff of this there's going to be some interest...BIGTIME!

What version(s) of AM does this work in?

Cheers

David

It works for me in versions 13 and 15 on Windows, so far. I think there was a new version of the SDK around 13, so it probably won't work in anything less, but I would be interested to hear.

Caroline,

As most know, I've had reusable/interchangeable/snap-on 'everything' for about 2 years now: hair-dos, hair color (any hair-do can go with any hair color), eye color, layered face maps (each layer so I can age each char model -- you need standard spline construction and standard flattening to do this), and, most especially, reusable/interchangeable wardrobe. My 'character models' are 'virtual actors' who must play many parts and so all this stuff must be flexible. My character models are just bald untextured heads -- pre-made elements are added (snap-on as much as possible) as needed for the part their needed for.

The next step for me is what I call 'morph clothes' (off/on poses make different collars, short/long sleeve tops, shorts/slacks and the clothing texturing is all interchangeable -- again standard splines and flattening) and... morph faces (poses change facial features). This is how much I dislike rigging LOL!

BTW, everything is tied into the AM libraries which are organized using the lib-manager utility.

I'll be very interested in what you are doing (are you using cloth!?!? -- I'm not so far -- I'm testing using animated decals for the changing wrinkles). I can't look right now; I'm setting up two new surround sound systems (LV and bedroom -- we finally got HDTVs) and the house is totaled and my wife is waiting for me to clean up my messes LOL. In the next few days, when this project is done I'll take a good look.

Modeling a character with fixed outfits never made sense to me. Way to go!

Cheers,
Rusty

Edit: PS... I'm using V14 for my current project. Will your stuff work for that?

I guess I'm not the only one who does it then. I have a clothesfit action to drop the clothing on top of a generic model that gets customized using poses

Rusty - I regularly go back and read your posts about your organizational methods, that's why I had thoughts about interchangeable heads. DressMe probably is not as advanced as what you are doing, it is very simply a matter of bone constraints, so that the clothing is made after the body, and the rigging copied from the body. I guess if you use the same mesh and rigging as the body, the cp weighting and smartskin would automatically be done, too.

I am not sure how suitable it would be for animation - I have not tested it extensively in moving poses, only static ones. The poke through issue might get annoying.

Also, I suffer from lack of available models and clothing as yet . My ambitions are way ahead of my abilities.

My first step to remedy this is happening in the TSM Rigging forum, where we are revamping the Gala model using the TSM rig, thanks to the generous assistance of the experts. Clothing for her follows that. Hopefully others will be able to follow later and learn how to do all this from these posts.

After that I would like to look into documenting the library system - as soon as I think I've got it sussed, I move on to other things and forget how it works, like your library manager, which should have more publicity. But of course with an extensive wardrobe, then organization is paramount. (You should see my own closet. Actually, you shouldn't - it really needs a library system )

I won't be using cloth for a while, until I have caught up on my current projects. I need to get this out and people using it first.

I envisage DressMe as a great way to learn A:M, using existing content, and gradually making your own.

Cloth is maybe a little difficult for the novice user, but is a great extra, especially if it gets explored extensively in the other new forums. (-It's such an exciting time right now here in the forum, with heaps of activity going on, and different people exploring different areas.)

DressMe should work in v14 - I have tested it on Vista in v13 and XP in 13 & 15. It's only a 30k download, just put it into your hxt folder and give it a whirl. And let me know .

(I'm envious of your TVs - We still have our 20 year old Sony we bought in America and shipped here (Aus), even though it does not receive Aus channels, and we have to have challenging wiring to obscure converter units. I keep hoping it will break, but it won't.)

poke through can be dealt with if there's away to keep the underlying patches from rendering...

Great idea for a plugin, Caroline.

I hope you have some more up your sleeve!

Caroline,


Knowing that you wrote a plugin, and that I have being looking around for a long time on how to write a plugin for AM, having little success, can you share -how you did it or where you learn it?

-Which version of Visual studio or C you used?

-Aby Examples?

This plugin is about as simple as it gets, and it's not easy to get started.

Have you downloaded the SDK? It has sample programs in it for almost everything.

I used a very old version 6 Standard from 10 years ago, and I think that is the lowest version you can use. The free ones (Studio Express) don't work, because you have to be able to use MFC.

This tutorial will get you started with an empty project:

http://www.tachyonburst.com/tutorials/am/sdk/empty/

The internal data structure of A:M is very complex, and a joy to ponder over. Lots of stuff pointing to other stuff pointing to other stuff, if you get my drift

I have a lot of printed sheets all over my desk of the classes, trying to work out what relates to what.

And I read every post in the old SDK forum too.

Looking at that Im beginning to think your an alian

Gonna play with this today. Great idea and could mean big things for AM new user usability.

Thanks, Paul - let me know what you think.

Works as advertised! In V14 too. AM does give me a little warning saying that I might have problems loading V15 content, but it doesn't stop me from doing it.

Now to play with making the clothes. So to understand, you have to make sure that the bones in the clothes have to have the same name as the bones in the character? And you run the rigging process in TSM 2 as you would a character?

Great, Paul - it's always a little nervewracking when people give your software a go, but it is just a really simple little plugin.

The bones of the clothes that will match the body should have EXACTLY the same name as the bones in the GEOMETRY of the body. Any rig will work. So if you are using the TSM rig, don't match any of the black bones to the bones in the clothes. Having said that, it would probably work OK anyway. I was just thinking of sleeves, and the two upper arm bones. You could probably just match the arm bone in the clothes to the upper arm control bone. I have only tried geometry bones, but you could give it a go, and try the control bone.

I just reread your post - NO, don't run the clothes through TSM. The clothes only need the bones that tie to the GEOMETRY bones of the body. And of course any other special rigging for dynamic constraints, in the skirt, for example. But NO control bones, because once the clothes are on, the bones in the clothes should not be touched. They would be controlled by the body's bones.

I hope that makes sense.

Does this dress me thing works for v 13

it got into v 13 want to try to play wid it

Yes, it does work in v13.

You can download samples in the first few posts of this thread, and also instructions on how to make your own clothing.

Just revisiting Caroline's DressMe plugin a couple years later... it looks like this is now included in the V16's HXT folder? Awesome!

I don't remember this. This is cool!
Steve

Yes... it turns out (after all this time) that this is a very cool little utility.

As stated in Caroline's PDF and embellished here, a good workflow: (Or rather: How I did it. NOT always the best way...)

-Open your rigged model to be garmented.
-Immediately 'Save As'
-Select the CP's you will 'borrow' to make your clothes, and using 'period' key select all others and delete... save.
-Now, to offset the CP's a little from the underlying skin, use the 'PushCPs' hxt utility. (Select mesh, RMB, Plugins, Wizards, PushCPs) I started with an amount of .5 and added from there as needed/where needed.
-Recolor/texture the clothes...delete unnecessary groups. Caroline recommends deleting unneeded bones as well... I didn't. Save
-Make alterations to the clothes as needed. For instance, in the attached image, the legs were co-joined to create a skirt.
-Bring the character model and the clothes model into a choreography. Turn on constraints and rigs for both. Make the clothes 'unselectable' to avoid grabbing it in the future as you should not need to.
-RMB on clothes in PWS and select 'DressMe'. A requester box will open asking which model to use, select your character.
-Your clothes are now constrained to your character! Go ahead and animate, drop actions on your character. You will need to adjust things here and there.

AWESOME CAROLINE! Why do I wait so long to try cool stuff like this?

great plug in...I had not seen this post before....great example john and thanks for explain it...I am going a try it...

No problem. Basically, it does what I had tried to do originally and found to be too much... which is to 'orient like' and 'translate to' each bone from the garment's rig to the character's rig. Once they are 'nailed' to each other... the clothes fit!

John, would you please be willing to post a short animation demonstrating the use of this plug-in? even a second or two would help me understand the 'look'.

The pdf in this post explains how to create a simple tee for Thom, and also explains that you RIG the clothes with the same named geometry bones as your model's geometry bones (eg right bicep, right forearm, etc). The plug-in will do a "batch like" translate to, orient like for each of the bones in the clothes model to each of the same named bones in the model to be clothed.

HERE is where it is explained how to use the plug-in