It would seem the skills I picked up years back doing tattoo on real people don't do me a bit of good with Poser. I've done several tattooed textures on Poser figures, but always on a broad area of the 'front' or 'back' section of the map. I really want to try a tattoo on the shoulder or upper arm (bicep) area, but this would land right on the seam. Is it a maddeningly slow process of splitting the tattoo in halves, lining the halves up as best you can, saving the texture, rendering on a Poser figure, re-opening the texture map, realigning the halves, and keep adjusting over and over 'til you get it right? Please, please, please tell me there's a quick and easy method to doing this!

Sorry JettBoy, there ain't one. We've been moaning about this one forever. V3's new mapping makes it a lot easier to do them, but for Mike, V2, and the rest, there just isn't an easy way. Anyone else have an idea on this one? I've often thought that a utility could be written to break an image into two parts and stretch it to cover the seem.

Trial and error, I'm afraid. I loaded up Mike with a UV template mapped onto the body as a guide when I created my own armband tattoo. It took a bit of messing around but the results are acceptable. There is a little distortion and stretching - but then, there is on the real one around my own arm. :) Gimme a few minutes and I'll post a side on pic to show you. Meantime, I have a self portrait in the Gallery which shows the thing from the front. One bit of good news - Victoria 3 is much easier to tatto; I posted a thread about this a couple of days ago. I'm guessing Mike 3 (if it ever happens) will be mapped in a similar way.

The best way I've found to apply tattoos is in Paint Shop Pro or Photoshop. You can see how it looks by clicking the link. I've also used the Eraser brush set at low opacity and density and erased portions to make the tattoo appear more realistic. The tattoo is on it's own layer so I can work on it before merging with my figure. I've also changed the layer mode to multiply and adjusted the opacity. You'll find some tattoos in the freebie section are saved in .psd format and applied in Photoshop. Hope this helps. http://www.renderosity.com/viewed.ez?galleryid=254303&Start=1&Sectionid=1&WhatsNew=Yes

Gracias! I'll probably at least try the 'legit' method of playing with it 'til it lines up or creating perspective UV, but being completely aware of my own laziness I'm sure I'll eventually just slap it on in Photoshop. Thanks again for your help, folks. Have a wonderful New Year!

Deep Paint is great for this sorta thing.

One trick I've found is to open the texture in PhotoPaint (or photoshop) and put the tattoos on different layers. Position the parts so they look close and then save the picture as a PSD file. Leave photopaint running and go to Poser. Load your figure and then apply the PSD file to the figure. The nifty thing about this is that you don't have to reload a new texture everytime you make changes. When you render the figure the texture is automatically updated. So load the texture, render the figure and see how close it is. Then switch over to photopaint and make adjustments. Then save the PSD. Go back to poser and re-render. The texture will automatically reload. Note, you have to render the figure before the chage will show. Repeat until you get it matched up properly. It's not perfect, but it beats rendering, making changes, saving, loading a new texture, and rendering. Eric J

Eric - thanks for the tip; I never thought of that one. Cool idea - I'll try it right now.

Great idea, Eric. I'll give it a shot.

Jettboy, I experimented with tats a few months ago and a couple of years ago before that. Occasionally I feel the desire to put a tat on a figure and I end up starting over with new ideas each time. I'm not that good at it but from what I've done so far it seems that EricJ is pretty right on. It helps if the texture map is high res 2800x2800 or better. Note that as the resolution changes the seam changes slightly too, so you will have to custom fit your textures to the seam. Don't bother splitting the tat just make two copies on two seperate added layers. If I remember correctly, you will have to turn one copy upside down in order for it to match. also there is a problem with the actual mapping on the horizontal(?) axis - You are mapping a 'flat' tat onto what amounts to a cylinder(for want of a better word.) There is a lenghtening effect the further you get away from the seam, so you will want to compensate for that somehow perhaps by forshortening the tat as it goes away from the seam on the 'horizontal axis'. that last is still a problem for me and where I left off on the project the last time. best of luck with this, - TJ