Weighting Clothing items

Please do not re-post/replublish this tutorial partially nor in whole.

Weighting Clothing items

This tutorial will guide you trough the steps of weighting clothing items.
Clothing is basically anything that is not derived from an accessory including, but not limited to hair and poses.

You can download the mesh used in this tutorial here(?)

Starting a new project

First create a new project, either male or female.
This will open up a new document, witch contains the avatar and its skeleton.

Alternatively you can open any of the templates available in the "IMVU File Editors" file collection straight from the Google warehouse(?), you can find out more about that in the
Novice tutorials(?).

Textured Avatar template I prefer to use the textured versions, cause it gives me a better view of things, also i can replace the texture with whatever i want to use on my base mesh. But for this tutorial i will use the default template.

hierarchies

One of the 1st things you might notice when you have opened up a new project is when you have your Outliner(?) toolbox open (You can find that under, [Window] > [Outliner])
That there are 2 separate hierarchies one called "BodyMesh" and one called "Skeleton".

The BodyMesh and all its groups inside are used to position and build our meshes on. there is no need to alter these groups as they will get ignored at export.

The Skeleton and all its components are used to weight our mesh to, (Note that you can only weight to "AttachementRoot" when your making a accesorie).

Building your mesh

First we have to worry only about the BodyMesh(?), this is where we have to build our clothing mesh on.

For this tutorial i wanted to make a easy and quick tuxedo top. So i'm adding Buttons, the end of the sleeves, and a tie.

Notice how its all positioned according to the BodyMesh.

We do not need to worry about the torso mesh, this will be added in the end.

Now that we are done with building our mesh we have little use for the body-mesh. You can go ahead and hide(?) it.

Weighting your mesh

Now that the BodyMesh is hidden, all there's left is our Mesh and the Skeleton,
For what we are now are going to do you can use either the "Outliner"(?) or the "Entity Info"(?) tool, i will be using the "Entity Info"(?) cause it will show more clear what exactly we are doing here.

First we will group together the parts that will be weighted to one particular bone.

Each bone of the skeleton has its own name. these are the names you going to need to weight your mesh to.
Select the bone you want to weight part of your mesh to and check out the bone name in the entity info window. Then copy that bone name.

In this case we want to weight the 2 buttons in the middle to "Spine02".so we're going to select those 2 buttons and group them together.
Once they are in a group we call that group "Mesh.Spine02" and you repeat this process with all the parts you need to weight.

Exporting

Now we are ready to export, simply save your mesh then go to :
[Plugins] > [IMVU File Editor] > [Export]

Finishing up

Beta Alert
The options presented in this part of the tutorial are still being expanded. At its current state we are limited to add only default avatar parts, in future this limitation will be lifted.

Now we're almost done, we've made our mesh, weighted and exported it, now to finnish it up. You probably are going to want a skin-composite product, so you will be able to apply opacity to your mesh.

We can easily do that by selecting:
[Plugins] > [IMVU File Editor] > [Edit Export] > [Make skin composite(?)]

Now there is 1 last thing we need to add to our mesh, its still missing an upperbody.
Go to:
[Plugins] > [IMVU File Editor] > [Edit Export] > [Add Bodypart] > [Male] > [NakedTorso]

Now your work in SketchUp is all done, and your mesh is all ready for use in the client.
You can find more info about that here(?)

You can see the end-result of this tutorial on IMVU here

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