---

The first step is to import the model we want to make clothing for. You need to use the HABWare OBJ2MAX plugins. These will let you directly import the OBJ files used by poser. NOTE: Most of the time when loading figures into MAX, you want to directly load the OBJ file from the :Runtime:Geometries: folder. This is one of the few times you don't want to do that. If you export your figure from Poser (before doing any actual posing of it) it will be much easier to add the clothing to it later. Make sure you have done all of your body shaping first, if you are going to change the size of the model at all, but none of the posing, aka moving limbs around. The HABWare plugins allow you to selectively import only the portions of the model you need, for the skirt only import the abdoment, hips, and thighs. If you aren't sure, import everything, and just delete the pieces you don't want afterwards. Removing the extra pieces is not actually required, it just makes things simplier.
The second step is to add a cylinder object. Drag it out just big enough to cover whats needed. Adjust the height to match the length of skirt desired. Increase the height segments so that we'll be able to push and pull the skirt to fit in the next step. If you have too few, you won't get the skirt to form fit along the curve of the hips, too many and you'll just make more work for yourself and the renderer with all the extra vertices/polygons. Since I'm just doing a mini-skirt here, I'll only use four rings. Align the center of the cylinder to the hips, matching both z and x. Move the cylinder up along the y axis to a spot that looks good.
Add an Edit Mesh modifier, and select the SubObject vertices. Now you can edit the vertices by hand to closely fit the model. I like to select the top ring, then use Scale Uniform, Scale Squash, and of course Move, to get the top ring of vertices into a nicely shaped oval, that centered around the waist. Beginners may find it helpful to select and hide the hips and legs, so those objects aren't cluttering the screen. Repeat for the lower three rings. Remember at the bottom of the skirt, it will not closely fit around the legs, unless its supposed to be spandex. Start doing test renders on each of the four views, and make sure that none of the model underneath pokes through your skirt. At this point, feel free to grab just a few vertices here and there to drag them away from the model to get it looking good. Don't get too caught up in trying to make it fit perfectly in this step! As you will find out later on, the tighter you make your clothing in this step, the more trouble you'll have positioning it later on. Also note that while the cylinder we started with had the four rings evenly spaced out up and down, you don't need to keep them evenly spaced. In fact, if I was going to do this over again, I would move the top three rings higher up, because you'll want more rings wherever the curves are, and fewer rings where the object just hangs straight down.
The fourth step is very easy. You need to add a UVW mapping modifier, selecting cylindrical mapping. The UVW modifier should popup exactly where you need it. You could have selected the "Generate Mapping Coordinates" checkbox in step two, and skipped this step. I just wanted to show you how to do this with the UVW modifier, because it is a more general solution. There will come a time when you need to put UVW coordinates on some object that doesn't have a handy checkbox to do it for you, and now you know how. Why do you need a UVW mapping modifier, or mapping coordinates anyways? because this will make the OBJ export plugin save texture information in your OBJ file so when you import it into Poser, you can later assign a texture to it.
Now you need to export your skirt to an OBJ. The OBJ export plugin will export every item in the scene. So what I like to do is this: Do an Edit|Hold, select the skirt, pick select invert, and delete. This will delete everything but the skirt. We can now perform the export make sure you UNcheck the rotate object checkbox. You do not want your skirt rotated. When finished exporting, do a fetch to get right back where you were. Of course, saving your work is always an excellent idea. Who knows when something will crash!
Back insider Poser, you want to Import your new piece of clothing. When Poser pops up the import file dialog, select your file. When it pops up the next dialog with import options, uncheck everything listed. This will make Poser pull it in just like you had modeled it in MAX (perfect, right?)
Depending on whether you exported your figure to import into MAX back in step 1, and how closely you made the skirt match up inside MAX, you may have some tweaking ahead inside Poser. Adjust the transX-Y-Z, and possibly the Scales-X-Y-Z until your skirt properly fits. I like to adjust the OriginX-Y-Z as well, but I don't think its really required.
Looks good so far! Now you have two choices, you can either attach the skirt to the hips of the girl, or you can replace her hips with the skirt. If you attach the skirt to her hips, the skirt will move around with her, but if you bend and pose her, the skirt will not deform to match. If you need the skirt to deform, you will have to choose Figure|Replace Body Part and select the skirt. Now when you move her limbs around, the skirt will deform like it should. This is because just as Poser knew how to bend the hips around, it will bend the skirt around instead. The only problem with the replace approach is, sometimes its not feasible because the prop doesn't completely cover the part it needs to replace. For example, you couldn't do a replace body part with a g-string, because the hips underneath will disappear.
Uh oh. Well as you can see here you will run into problems. First, we took a short cut early on by using a cylinder, which has solid ends. A real skirt would require using a very thin tube to start with. I didn't want to get into all of that at the start of the tutorial, so you can go back and try a tube now that you know what you are doing. Plus as I mentioned earlier, the closer fitting your garment is, the more likely Poser is going to have trouble bending it to match the model so other parts don't accidentally pop through. This is because Poser uses spherical falloff zones at the joint parameters. While these were optimized for the model while she was naked, they may not work perfectly for your newly created body parts. You can tweak the joint parameters yourself if you feel ambitious enough, but that is the subject for a whole 'nother tutorial.