enimaroah I hope that you had a Merry Christmas and that all is well with you. I also would like to thank you for your recent reply. Over the holiday I spent a lot of time working on the very skirt issue that you mentioned... namely how to handle distortions caused by the avatars leg movements.
Let me first explain that I was not using the skirt bones properly as I was following the tutorials too closely and was transferring the weights directly from the rigged armature during the HS import workflow. Instead I should have had Blender calculate the weights for me when parenting the skirt to the armature. Then after I figured that part out I was running into another issue because I had Blender calculate the weights for all of the meshes in the skirt individually. This resulted in the meshes all being slightly out of sync and causing weird gaps to appear in the skirt in HS. It took me a couple of hours to realize that I needed Blender to calculate the weights for the largest peice and then transfer them directly from that mesh to the others in order to sync them up properly.
After that I spent the better part of a day trying to weight paint the skirt to stop the clipping issues caused when the avatar moved into certain poses without any success. Perhaps if I had a working example from a Blender file then I could study it in order to fix my issue, but for now I am forced to just leave things as they are. Besides I sincerely doubt that a girl wearing that kind of dress could strike one of those idol poses without falling on her butt from getting her legs twisted up in the long crinolines or hoop skirts worn underneith the dress to make it poof out like it does... Besides at this point I am spending more time trying to port my clothing into HS than actually making clothing in Marvelous Designer, something that I find disturbing since my primary goal is to learn to use that software package.
Speaking of which I was able to create this over Christmas Eve and Christmas day
View attachment 20978
It is another outfit for Kurumi Tokisaki from Date A Live, one out of roughly seven or eight in the anime, light novel illustrations and other official sources. I figure that if I can make most if not all of her dresses over the next few weeks then I will have a pretty firm grasp on making Lolita fashion in MD and can then move on to men's formal wear... something even more complex than most formal dresses.
BTW I hate weight painting in HS. Too many bones to keep track of, grrr!
P.S. Sorry for not getting back to you until today. The landlord informed me at the last second that painters were supposed to come and paint my bedroom sometime this week so I was stuck at home waiting for them. Guess who never showed up?
Shine
