[Edymnion]

Hey, I've been working on a character mesh that I (now) intend to rig in Poser, and I did make a one piece swimsuit for it to wear.

The easiest way to make tight fighting clothing that I've found is to first import the poser figure you want to work with into AC3D. Easiest way I've found to do that is simply load it up, put it in the T position, then export as a .obj and import that into AC3D.

Then, to make the tight clothing, select all of the surfaces you want to cover, and copy/paste them right on top of the model. Select the original model and set it to Hidden, then go into your toolbar in the 3D setting and select "Show Hidden Objects".

Now, you should see only the duplicate body area you copied/pasted, and not the rest of the figure in your 2D work windows, and see everything in the 3D window. Set your copy/pasted skin to an obnoxious color like blue so you can clearly see in the 3D view where its clipping through the base model. There should be a lot of clipping.

In your 2D windows, start selecting vertices and expanding them out into bigger areas. Don't do the entire mesh at once, because it'll just throw off your proportions. Expand a small section until it no longer clips through your base model in 3D mode. Go expand another area until it no longer clips. Do this until you have the entire thing "outside" of the original mesh and you don't see anywhere the base figure is clipping through your new skin. Now you have your base skintight suit to start modifying.

First thing you'll want to do is smooth out the muscles. Its obviously going to be a bulkier suit, so you won't be seeing rippling abs through it. Making seems is actually fairly easy, you just have to make a few new slices in the mesh. Slice down the poly's where you wan the seem to be, then simply pull the new row of vertices in towards the middle.

To make folds in the fabric, do the exact opposite. Slice where you want to have the fold be, slice a circle around that, then move the middle line out away from the center.

That probably sounds a little confusing, so I've uploaded some pictures of the model I'm working on to help illustrate.

You can see where I have the swimsuit mesh so close to the actual body that the lines of the navel are half-visible. All I did there was combined the polygons of the skin there to eliminate the belly button entirely.

The seams around the edges are even easier. I just extruded some extra space around the holes, cut them away, and made rings out of them. Pushed the rings back up against the edge of the swimsuit, and voila, instant hemlines.

Granted, you're going to have a little more work to do since the base model you'll be working with is already in high poly count mode, which means more vertices to cut/move, but the idea will be the same.

Just start with a copy of the area you want to cover, make it bigger, smooth out the details, then add in seams/folds/etc.

If you want, I can make her a new set of clothing with more step by step pictures.