looksgood opened this issue on Jan 01, 2003 ยท 4 posts
BeatYourSoul posted Thu, 02 January 2003 at 12:32 AM
You have all of the right tools. The question is, is this "elf woman" your own model, someone else's model, or what? More than likely, if you downloaded it or, especially, purchased it, you can get or ask for a "texture template" for the model and bypass UVMapper altogether. For rendering with your own textures in Poser, there are three basic things needed: 1. A model (the 3D geometry describing some shape - person, thing, etc). The model contains points (vertices) and planes (facets, faces, polygons) as well as other pertinent information. This you already have in your "elf woman". 2. A surface mapping correlated to the 3D geometry and a 2D representation of it. For Poser, this is always treated as UV mapping. UV mapping is just one way of flattening the model's vertices and polygons onto a plane for creating 2D textures that are then 'wrapped' onto the 3D model in a 3D application. A texture template is the 2D representation which is just an image (bitmapped - jpg, bmp, tif, etc) showing this flattened model layout - usually all of the polygon edges black on white background. 3. A texture map, which is just another bitmapped image. The texture template is used in programs like PhotoShop to tell you where to put your color and other information; almost like a coloring book. The final product is a texture map image which is loaded into the material(s) of the object in Poser. What UVMapper does for you is lets you create or modify an existing UV mapping for a model. If your model doesn't have UV coordinates or no texture template is available, you can use UVMapper to create one or both of them. Using UVMapper to create texture templates and UV coordinates for your model is a little involved (!). There are tutorials all over the web that discuss its use. Once you have a texture template, you can open it in PhotoShop and use layers to add the "texture" (colorations) over the template. Save it as PSD for editing, but also flatten it and save as a separate jpg, bmp, tif, or whatever Poser accepts for material images. Then you can specify that image as the material. Again, this can get complicated depending upon the number of templates, body parts with separate materials, and so on. There are tutorials here (see top of page above) and all over the web that discuss creating textures. Definitely check out Poser Arcana at Daz3D for many beginner tutorials. HTHAL, BeatYourSoul