CyberRaks: Victoria

Fantasy Dancer Costume and Poses

I've "collected" belly dancers for twenty years. It is an art form I value above gymnastics — the other premier art that allows a woman to celebrate her physical self — for a variety of reasons, some of which I've described elsewhere. (I've also written a tribute to the queen of the art, Zahirah.) So when I saw the Fantasy Dancer and the Digiport poses that go with it, I scraped together about $50 and treated myself to a prized new tool for my Poser kit. With the addition of two mappaks from Dee's Den and RPD Styling, you can create your own dance troupe with a total of seven costume color schemes and some variety of styles.

I'm going to review this set in three pieces, beginning with the costume itself, then the mappaks, and finally the jewelled crown of the suite, the poses. The costume is designed for Victoria 2, but it works on Stephanie Petite as well.

Traveller's Victoria Fantasy Dancer Costume (VFDC) offers a beautiful, functional design, though it is aptly called a "Fantasy Dancer" costume rather than a belly dancer costume. As you would expect from a legendary morphologist, the pieces come with some excellent customization tools. For example, below are eight variations on the basic veil. Except for one trick with a neck twist, these changes were all made with just the Veil's head morphs.

Parameter Changes to the VFDC Veil

Notice that pieces of the veil "apparatus" can be removed — the jewels on the earpieces (not shown), on the nose and forehead, and two pieces of the wireframe, to be exact. Additionally, sixteen other parameter dials allow a wealth of custom shapes for the veil and even some tricks that make it look like it's moving with the dancer. The veil is easily the most versatile item in the kit, but other parts are similarly detailed and modifiable.

The entire costume consists of ten items, each a separate figure that you can choose to include in your outfit ensemble. You will find the veil, two shoes, a pair of ankle bands, a loincloth and chaps-like pants, a bra, and matching sets of wrist bands, arm bands, and sleeves.

	Click buttons to change image.

For some reason the shoes are separate and the other limb items (arm and leg elements) are served up in pairs. If you want an asymmetrical look, a little creative materials work will do the trick, though.

This mix-and-match approach is great in that it allows some selection, but a pain in the butt to work with, since each item must be loaded and conformed separately, and if you change the female base figure, a lot of your work has to be redone unless you plan ahead very carefully.

Fortunately, the kit includes MAT files that make a whole slew of necessary changes to material colors, texture, reflection and transparency files and settings with a single click.

On the left is a complete load of the basic costume, including the textures that come with it (and in Digiport Pose 3). This view represents the costume "out of the box," so to speak, with no modifications except some minor fitting of the bra straps and veil wires. (The loincloth is "starched" flat even after conforming it, because its segments don't have equivalents on the figure.)

Click on the image controls below the picture, and it will be modified to provide a quick demonstration of the costume's versatility. Note the swirl effect in the pants and, to a lesser degree, in the sleeves, created with the basic Twist dials and a few custom Twists. Unfortunately, the loincloth doesn't curve very successfully, so it will generally require post work.

Below, right, is a detail from another model, using Mary Dell's Deirdre and a different Digiport pose (23), to show the fine detail in the chains.

The Fantasy Dancer costume represents a good compromise of authenticity and practicality, in regard to its usefulness as a belly dancer outfit. Belly dance costumes build on three or four basic styles: Hollywood, Tribal, Gypsy, and what might be called Fusion.

We could argue for weeks about whether those are really fundamental types, and then about whether there are three, four, or some other magic number. But it's not worth the trouble to me, nor am I an expert. If you want definitive definitions, so to speak, you should look at a dedicated belly dance site, like Yasmina's Joy of Belly Dancing.

Essentially, "Hollywood" means nightclub costumes, with lots of gauzy fabrics and rhinestones;

Eva Cernik at the Kismet Belly Dance Festival, 1999. From "Amanda's Gallery," at the Utah Raks site maintained by Rebecca Habtour. Used with permission of Amanda Williams.

the fact is, most of the "traditional" elements of belly dance costuming — the bra and bikini, the gauze veils, at least — come from the show business stream, not the cultural stream, of belly dance history (as does the term "belly dancing," but that would take us far afield). "Gypsy" means opaque fabrics that look thrown together to put on a show. "Tribal" means clearly and demonstrably derived from an ethnic costume such as the traditional dress of the Ouled Nail, Greeks, Persians, or Turks. And Fusion is that uniquely American phenomena a cynical humorist recently described as "white people co-opting a diverse selection of other cultures."

I have to confess that I can't think of any group more "tribal" than the Rom (Gypsies), nor a more obivous example of the show business tradition than Gypsy travelling players, so my divisions are already in trouble almost before I finish the paragraph. The emphasis with the "Gypsy" costume is on the improvised look, even though Gypsies themselves, especially in the Middle East, "dude up" just like the other tribes beloved of belly dancing costumers.

The one continuing thread, so to speak, in most belly dance costume, traditional or not, is large draping fabrics — veils, shawls, skirts, mantles, scarves. They may be nearly transparent or completely opaque, but they serve an essential role in the dance, replacing blatant nudity with hints and glimpses. Theoretically, a creative woman could throw together a great costume by decorating her bathing suit with the contents of her scarf drawer.

Flowing, moving garments, especially long skirts, are notoriously hard to create in Poser, so it's no surprise that these traditional elements of performance costume — shawls, hand-held veils, and voluminous skirts — are not provided with the VFDC. Unfortunately, a great dancer uses her costume rather than simply wearing it, and this outfit, for all its beautiful pantaloons and sexy lines, doesn't lend itself to that aspect of the dance. The modesty veil, the twist controls on the arm wraps and pant legs, and the segmentation of the loincloth provide some opportunity to give the costume a life of its own.

Regarding Morphs

The following table provides a breakdown of the morphs included with the costume pieces, along with a brief note on what the morph does. Note that except for the shores, the "limb elements" — the arm bands, wraps, wrist bands, and anklets — are designed as if they were single units; in other words, you can't put on one arm band, like you can one shoe. However, they all include individual controls for each limb, as well as body controls that allow you to make changes to both sides at once.

Parameters Available
Costume Item	Adjustable Elements	Dials	Functions
Veil	Head	No Nose Stone, No Brow Stone, No Side Stone, No Brow Wire, No Skull Wire	Removes item (actually pulls it inside the head, so minus values will "float" the stones).
		Head Front, Back, Left, Right	Adjust the drape of the veil.
		Adjust Front, Left, Right, Top, Back	Fit the wire frame to the head.
		Seven custom length and taper dials	Adjust taper and length of veil only.
Top (Bra)	Body, Chest, Collars, Neck	Choker [Neck]	Higher, Thinner, No studs, Spikes.
		Chains	Off the shoulder, fit to body, chest, and shoulders.
		Cups	Six adjustments to breast shape on body, chest, and shoulders.
Loincloth	18 segments (9 front, 9 back)	Segments	Standard Bend and Twist, Side2Side.
Pants	Body, Hip, Thighs, Shins	Thigh Adjust	Three fit top of fabric to body, hip, and thigh.
		Puffs	Nine adjustments to volume and shape of leg for body, thigh, shin.
Anklets, Wristbands, Armbands	Body, Shins, Forearms, Shoulders	Metal	No studs, Spikes (Body settings do both limbs at once). Note that "No studs" cancels out "Spikes."
Armwrap	Body, Shoulders, Forearms	Puffs	Nine volume adjustments to body, shoulders, and forearms.
		Twists	Four sleeve torque adjustments to body, shoulders, and forearms.
		Length	Two adjustments of sleeve bottom (balloon): body, forearm.
Shoes	Toes	Curl	Two controls curl and uncurl toe.
		Length	Two controls make toe longer/shorter.
The costume pieces come with body parts that do not have morphs added to them, such as the "Chest" of the Anklets. I haven't listed those body parts above. Adjusting the standard parameters on the "extra" body parts (such as twisting the Chest of the Anklet) usually has no effect, but it can create bizarre results. Changing the Chest Twist on the Veil makes a mess of the wires, for example. Most controls are cumulative, but some are not. For example, you can get a huge sleeve by adjusting the Body Puff of the arm wraps to 1.0 and then also adjusting the same control on the Forearm. Most controls are not "reversible"; that is, a minus value does not "uncurl" the Curl setting on the shoe.

This outfit is in desperate need of a "morph pak" that helps fit the clothing to specific body types and individual adjustments. The Top (bra and choker) is the most significant problem in this respect. While it offers a handful of basic morphs that control its overall size and allow adjustment of the size and position of the chain straps, there is no control for something as trivial as increasing the space between the cups (the "cleavage" dial on the chest) or for tightening the sides without shrinking the center. For these basic tasks, you are at the mercy of the Scaling controls and your expertise with magnets.

Making the bra cups fit a specific chest is a lengthy process. I have fitted costumes to Victoria, Stephanie, Catharina Harder's Sara, Mary Dell's Deirdre, Ingrid Gilbert's Magnolia, a handful of free Victoria variants (such as the unique Frank Paris figures sometimes available at Renderosity), and even, with limited success, the Millenium Girls (for whom, as you can imagine, the Top is useless). For the adult women, the scantiness of the cups is a mixed blessing; since the Top is so revealing, the fact that it can't be fitted very precisely isn't very noticeable, as long as the conforming shape is reasonably approximate and the areole coverage is roughly "street-legal."

Two Minor Problems

Much as I like the VFD costume, I have two serious quibbles about it — one with the product and one with the design. The first is that there are no zills (finger cymbals). These are small and might be a hassle to create (I'm going to try, because I gotta have 'em), but no dancer would perform without them, just as no real dancer would be caught dead anywhere except in a Disney movie wearing those silly shoes, which would actually interfere with dancing. (A set of sandals would be a more likely choice, though most dancers go barefoot when they can. Get good sandals for free at Awful Soul, an Egyptian-influenced fantasy site.)

The second problem is that the costume does not provide a bit more of a "modesty mode." This is not a prudery issue. It's a question of making the costume flexible and authentic. The fact is, the Digiport poses look great nude, and I can imagine enjoying a dancer in this costume, or nude, or wearing more fabric than an entire wedding entourage. But only a certain type of dancer would appear in this costume, which emphasizes the Hollywood/striptease elements of the belly dancer (hence, "fantasy" dancer, I guess) at the expense of reality. A minimum requirement are a more concealing bra and a bikini bottom under the loincloth.

Notice, in the Deirdre image below, the scanty bra cup (even more obvious in the detail shot above). And Deirdre is no Voluptuous Vickie, friends and neighbors. In twenty years of collecting belly dancers, I've seen some pretty over-the-top costumes — scanty, risqué, revealing, provocative, downright naughty — but nothing as minimal as this, indoors or out. "Fantasy" indeed.

One tiresome lack in the costume kit is MAT files for applying the original textures. You can create these yourself, of course, if you know how, and they are absolutely necessary for including the original textures in a situation where you are swapping them in and out with other mappaks, as I learned to my irritation while preparing the Mappak review.

The problem is that you must reload the costume to get the original materials settings, and when you do you can either have your custom modifications or the Conform to settings, but not both. So it is difficult to add the original costume without losing some hard work. I recommend making MAT files immediately after you assemble your first costume.

The "modesty" problem can be handled with a bit of custom texture making, working with templates for the basic items in the Victory Clothing Pak or free Vickie clothing items available at Renderosity. That said, the pants are fun to work with, the loincloth is flexible and easy to adjust, the chains are delicate as jewelry, and the veil offers abundant customization, including the ability to remove parts. All in all, a good product, and the free templates allow for abundant custom fabrics.

The Rest of the Story

The texture that comes with the costume is pretty nice, and you can build your own with the templates. But if you want to skip that work and vary the costumes with a minimum of effort, take a look at the Mappaks to extend the look and variety of the costume package.

• Victoria's Fantasy Dancer Costume
• The DAZ3D Belly Dancer Mappaks
• The DAZ3D Belly Dancer Pose Kit