The clothing system has some new features, and some new clothes.
When you import an MHX file into Blender with the default settings, the character is dressed with a green sweater and blue trousers. So far it's the same as before, although the topology of the clothes is better. Whereas the previous garment was rather crappy (i.e. modelled from scratch by myself), the new clothes were made by modifying Ascottk's proxy mesh, and thus inherit the nice topology of this mesh. There are some other clothes that can be turned on in mh_export.config.
One rather cool feature the the ability to turn garment visibility on and off. This is useful if she is wearing different clothes in different scenes, or perhaps nothing at all. When you select the rig, the panel MHX Visibility to the right (toggle with N-key) has an entry for each mesh. Set HideSweater to 1, and our heroine is nude from the waist up. The hide sliders are object properties of the rig, and thus work with file linking. You can therefore keep a character with many different clothes in an asset file, link it into many shot files, and let her wear different clothes in different scenes without touching the asset file.
However, there is a problem. Clothing is close to the character's body, and sometimes the skin may peek through. This is not a big problem if your character is wearing the same clothes in all scenes. Simply delete vertices beneath the clothes, or assign them to the Invisio material of the joint diamonds. But there is another alternative. Select the mesh, choose the Skin material, and open the textures. The first few textures are masks; enable the masks for the visible pieces of clothing and leave the others unchecked. This produces much nicer renders.
The checkboxes to the right of the mask textures are purple. This means that they are driven, and it should really be impossible to change their states by clicking on them. The idea is that changing the Hide property should automatically modify mask visibility. Unfortunately, this does not happen, and I suspect that this is a bug, or omission, in Blender. Unfortunately, this means that masking does not work with file linking. If you want to turn on a mask in a shot file, you must do it in the asset file, thus messing up all other shot files using the same asset.
The software treats polygon hair as another piece of clothing (without a mask, though), and hence it can be turned off as well. Is this useful? Well, our heroine might decide to go scuba-diving, and then her hair will not be visible. More mundanely, turning off hair and clothes will probably speed up test renders. Or include a proxy mesh and turn off the main mesh.
Update: The clothes now come with some textures.
