Sup all. I finally finished the bump maps for Zelda's gold jewelry. And ran into more problems. When I apply the map, the indents on the shoulder and collar plates appear very blocky and pixelated, as shown above.

Compare that with this shot of the chest plate -- no pixellating here. I think the problem might be that the shoulder & collar plates were UVmapped in Cylindrical mode, and the map came out really stretched out. (Whereas the chest plate was mapped in regular Planar mode.) However, I don't know any other mode besides Cylindrical that would fit these plates, and I don't know how to USE Cylindrical without getting the distorted, stretched out map. Any ideas?

Hi MegaJar, long time no see. My computer is toast, so I haven't been here much. Get new one next week. Have you tried Steve Cox's new site? I think it's UVMapper .com, not sure, still haven't got all my stuff loaded after reformmating. He would be the best one to ask this. I have seen the threads that he has fixed the problem himself to help you out. Can't go wrong with that kind of service. I know that's not much help from me, but I hope I pointed you in the right direction. Tashar 59

Have you tried applying Planar mapping to the shoulders? How does that come out? Perhaps increase the texture resolution?

gaz: The plates begin in front of Zelda's body, curve up over her shoulders, and end in back of her -- they're essentially half-cylinders. If I tried a Planar mapping, I wouldn't be able to get the whole thing at once. As for the resolution, the bump map is a 24-bit .BMP file; how could I increase the resolution? beryld: Hey, how's it going? :-) Good idea, I'll try Steve's site directly. Thanx :-)

If you raise the resolution, it would make a big bum. file for us P4 users. I find most of my crashes are due to the bum. file. There are a lot of P4 useres out here still, so try to keep it freindly for all of us. Mind you, if it gets to be too big of a file, I just render it in POV-Ray. Allways a way to get around a problem. Don't ya just Love POSER? Well, I have about 5 min. left before my next crash. I'm out. Tashar 59 PS. Can't Wait to see the finished product. You did a great job on Link.

I have P4 Pro Pack, so I don't need .BUM files; I just use the picture files (.bmp, .jpg, whatever) as-is. :-)

Oh, and thanx 4 the compliments BTW :-)

Someone a while back was explaining how to use the offset in the settings for the cylindrical map to get a cleaner mapping for a half cylinder, and I think there was meant to be a tutorial at uvmapper.com. Basically you want to pull the axis down to the bottom of your half cylinder - try setting the y-offset to minus half of the y-dimension.

RHaseltine: actually, I saw that thread, and I already did that. It helped make the distortion uniform, but did not eliminate it. See the picture of the shoulder plate at the top of this thread? Imagine looking at that plate from above and to the side; now imagine you "uncurled" the plate so it was flat. From above, it would look kinda like a rectangle which was wider than it was tall; the left side of that rectangle would be the edge of the plate that was BEHIND Zelda's back, and the right side of the rectangle is the edge that's in FRONT of her. Getting the idea? Problem is, when I mapped the plate, UVmapper took that rectangle and stretched it, so it was MUUUUUCH wider than it should be. Using that template, anything drawn on the plate's texture would be compressed (and thus look thinner) when the stretched-out texture was "unstretched" to fit the actual geometry. Get my meaning?

Could you pre-stretch your texture to compensate? You don't have to keep the proportions of the template in your texture - Poser works with the proportion, so many % along, so many % down, not the absolute position.

I did pre-stretch it. Since the texture would end up looking much thinner than I actually drew it, I had to draw it WIDER than I wanted in order to compensate. But while that got the overall SHAPE I wanted to appear correctly, the PIXELS were not so lucky -- thus, the blocky, jagged edges you see here. I think that if I try another UVmapping, and manually unstretch the plates before saving the template, I may be able to get a (relatively) undistorted template. Of course, that means creating the bump map all over again :-(

here's a suggestion: Deep Paint has the ability to select a portion of the UV map then remap in a 3D viewer so you can see your uv's projected and rotate the mapping coordinates in real time as you watch it unfold....then you can place the new uv's anywhere on your imagemap they have a demo version for download www.righthemisphere.com and tutorials there also.