I all. I want to add my own clothing (modeled in vertex room) to Daz/Poser models (with bones) in Carrara. I tried in Carrara6Pro and found I couldn't add a thing to a Poser figure - so I saved a base figure out of Poser as a Poser file, imported it into Carrara 5 Pro, added the vertex object there, which took some thought - had to remove skeleton, then add agian after new "clothes" were added, then save as a Carrara file and open in Carrara6... and boy does the skeleton come in messed up... I am trying to add my own clothing to the already rigged models from Poser/DAz - What can I do to make it easier? The way I am doing it now feels like the long way around. And, I loose the ability to add poses since the model comes in as a stand-alone rigged figure... Is there a way to bring in these rigged figures without having the bones turn around and all messed up? Thanks for the help -

Have you considered exporting the clothing mesh and rigging it in Poser as a standard Poser item? At that point, you could Transposer or use the Carrara native importer to bring it back in.

I suck at rigging in Poser... I mean, I've tried but it didn't seen very easy. If I put in the time, I never figured out how to make it conform to the figure. And : ) I don't like the way the figure pokes through the clothing... that's why I like the figure bones to control both the figure and the clothes on top, it packages the entire model... yes, maybe my thoughts on the best way to rig a figure are outdated with cloth and all, but I like a model to bend and move without worrying about flesh poking through clothing during animation. Thanks though, I would like to be able to make clothing for figures -

Yah.  The whole conforming scheme is a bit of a hack.  Never quite worked right.  The reason it was adopted is to allow the face and hands and so forth to be modeled once, and outfits be interchangeable.  But the downsides is that clothing never quite fits right or looks right.

One wonders if there wasn't some way to combine meshes instead, to place the clothing item with the figure mesh into a single mesh to be rigged as a single object (which is basically how they do it for professional animations).

Technically, since you are (presumably) doing this for your own personal work, you could do a hack-and-stitch and put the clothing items and figure mesh together in the modeling application, then go and rig that complete model.  One problem you might have, though, is trying to preserve the UV maps.

Me, I'd learn to rig.  Carrara's rigging is superior, but Poser's rigging is at the moment usable across more platforms (Poser, DAZStudio, Carrara).  Worth giving it a try.  Really, for something like a figure in a relatively skin-tight outfit, you could just borrow the cr2 from the base figure.  Might have to adjust a few zones to make them big enough, but otherwise should work.

Lot of clothing makers use "donor" cr2's anyhow.  I certainly do!  They are the simplest way of arriving at a good skeleton for a conforming clothing item.

Thanks for your time and knowledge. If I were to use the .cr2 for say the Mil kids, a character I feel has very few clothing items available for purchase, and I'm just looking for creating a shirt - The process: import the figure, use its body "as a guide" to create the shirt "around", use its zones to create my shader zones - to become bend zones in Poser - map the shirt - export to Poser, ... then use the set up room to add the rig from the mil kid... but how to get just the skeleton top? or do I use the shading zones and "auto" zone... Anyway, I want to do all animation in Carrara anyway. I like the idea of a single object, it is just now I can't do a thing in the vertex room with a Daz/Poser model except change weights or displace or morph, I can't add anything unless I use the model as an obj and add the bones later. am I wrong?

As far as I know, if you use the Native importer to Carrara you'll get an editable figure with editable bones.  But last time I worked with a boned object in Carrara, I remember having to "de-attach" the skeleton every time I wanted to make a change to the mesh.  That was annoying.

You've got the basic workflow there.  A couple things that can make it easier:

Import the Poser figure, but start a new vertex model for the clothing item.  Open the preview window as large as you can get it; that's where you will check to see how the clothing fits.  This works a little better than having everying in the same model window, as there isn't any way to "freeze" vertices in Carrara.  Very annoying when you keep grabbing the base figure instead of the new mesh you are building.

If you name vertice groups, these will show up as groups within Poser (if you create material zones, these show up as materials within Poser).  In the text of the .obj file the former are "g" lines, the latter "usemtl" lines.  Be careful, though; Carrara has a nasty habit of deleting group names.

You can edit the skeleton in the Setup Room, getting rid of excess bones.  Some people don't even bother -- the extra body parts don't hurt the model any.  Some of us find the "Donor Cr2" method simpler.  For that, you start with the distributable cr2 (usually available for download at DAZ),  then edit it to remove all morphs, materials, and many of the body parts (rarely does any clothing item have eyes, for instance).  Save that somewhere and make copies of it for the clothing items you create.

I have a few additional tricks that so far are serving me well enough.  Must mention I'm still horrid with creasing and fabric-drape type details.  Anyhow!  Nice trick is to work low-poly, fit the low-poly model, then tesselate that.  Even better if you UV map while still low-poly (a lot less work that way).  Another cool trick is outside of Carrara; that is to use Poser's dynamic cloth engine to "shrink fit" clothing items.  Or to drape them.  A poncho for Poser is almost as simple as cutting a hole in a square then running dyamic cloth simulations until you get one that looks nice.