look at the mesh shape in uvmapper. See how the squares change width and height when it hits the squiggly area? In pshop follow the squares of the mesh. Drawing straight lines across the chest is always hard, as the mesh/map is distorted by the pectoral area. Sometimes discretion is the better part of volor ..does that line HAVE to be there? can you bring it down a little bit to where the mesh is cleaner? At any rate youre going to have to do a lot of back and forth ing, editing loading, checking and over and over. I often check one line on a texture as much as 20 times before I get it perfect Remember, you get what you settle for. Lyrra

Only 20 times? I recently spent most of 2 days trying to put a stripe down the side of the legs on a V2 figure.........

Glad it's not just me that has this problem ...

A quick way would be to use bodypaint or Deep Paint

You may already be doing this but for those that don't know:-

• In UVMapper Pro select Texture/Auto Update.
• In your paint program select the whole texture and Edit/Copy. This sends the data to the clipboard where UVMapper will read it. (If its a very large texture then past your image to a new image, reduce its size to about 1000x1000 and copy that.)
• Back into UVMapper and select the chest area, then hit the Tab key to see the 3D view.
• In the 3D view go to View/Reset View to bring your selected area up close.
• Select View/Texture and View/Wire Frame.

You'll now clearly be able to see how your texture is being applied to the model. Adjust in your paint program, reselect and copy as required.

Hope this helps.

I've spent YEARS trying to do it! ...no success!!

super, I feel your pain. a lot of times I'll remap a figure or prop just because its so frustrating to texture it. texturing is tough, but theres a couple things you can do to make it easier; 1. study the uv template and follow the lines. uv mapping has a logic of its own. if you look at the template and then the wireframe mesh, you will see the corresponding polygons and get a sense of what goes where. 2. assuming you use photoshop, save and apply your texture as a .psd file. This way every time you edit your texture and save it, when you render it in poser the texture will be updated. This way you can constantly monitor your progress and fine tune your adjustments. hope that helps, good luck :)

I also have this problem. Not only getting the lines straight, but also stopping them from smearing when the line moves from a small poly to a bigger one. And not having the luxury of owning Photoshop (on my budget??), that means I have to close down Poser and restart it in order to get it to refresh its cache. Or save incrementally and apply the next version of the texture every time. (sigh) and I call this a hobby..:-))

every time you render poser looks at the texture again. So even if the texture preview doesn't show your latest edits the render will. So go ahead and edit the image you have applied, save and render in poser to see if you got it. Note: PSP 6 and above take PSD files, admittedly without all the bells and whistles of Pshop, but hey, at least you can open them with layers intact. Also check out Snowsultan's excellent seam guides, he usually marks problem areas

Errm - Lyrra - this didn't seem (seam??) to work for me (Using Poser 5). Some time ago I tried to create my own personal seam-map for one of the catsuits (I forget which one now), and although I re-rendered, the changes I made didn't show up. Took me a while to work out why. I was saving as JPGs under the same name. P5 looked and said "Oh! I've already got that one loaded" and rendered with the same (old) JPG. I don't have the cash to get Photoshop, so I have to do it the hard way.. Yes. Snowsultan's seam guides are excellent (that's where I got the idea from), but I wanted to work it out for myself, so I could use the technique for other things. Ahh, well, that's life Cheers, Diolma

Remember that you can also use layers and stuff. Put the UVMapper output in one layer, in a distinct colour, and the texture-map in other layers. Base colour in one, details in another, the bit you're working on in a third. Adjust the transparencies of the layers so you can see the mesh. Choose colours to make the details you're editing clear, rather than working with the final colours. Use the polygon mesh of the UV map as a texture and save those renders so you can relate the mesh to the object. Do a render with a checkerboard texture to get a feel for the flow of patterns, and the distortions. A lot of this is equally applicable to transparency maps, which are used to modify clothing. And, while I've not tried it yet myself, bump/displacement maps can give you those small changes at seams and hems, or for pockets. I don't claim to be an expert, but what I found is that it pays off to practise doing this stuff, and sometimes you need to go and look at the tools the paint program gives you and forget about Poser for a while.

huh ...well maybe thats a Poser5 Stupid Trick then .. Poser 4 works just fine, and thats what I use. No need to load up that whole slow-as-molasses-to-render beast just to check seams. I use UvmapperPro to check most of my work as I can load in an image and view it live on the mesh, but it's not 100% accurate, so I check in Poser4 before releasing.

To get a straight line on a section of the catsuit, assign a new group to that area, then create perspective UVs in the group editor, over a background that has a straight line traversing the area. Use the background image as the map for that area. The line on the suit will appear straight when the figure is viewed from the camera angle at which the perspective mapping was applied.

hmmmm From the book of Doug. Draw, test, render... draw again and again and again... throw in trash and change design or shell out fortune for new software. Actually the perspective UV is a great route to take if the project is just for yourself... but most of mine end up in the public arena. Doug

PS: nice belt, that darn thing just keeps on trucking.

Why doesn't somebody post/sell a body map with straight lines?

Why doesn't somebody post/sell a body map with straight lines? Becourse it would require a remapped character as well?

becasue its incredibly difficult and nobody has told any of the capable (patient) texture artists they want it? with the amount of work it would take I'd shy away from doing anything like that without a guaranteed payback for what would be weeks of work. (I'm not kidding) .... ding! flash ... a lightbulb just went off in my head ...ooooooh this might work .... heh heh more later ...

I'm sure it would sell. People could make better looking tight clothes MATs. I would easily pay $20 for it.

I remapped the Mike 1 and 2 bodysuit a long time ago, doing the best I could at the time, and gave it away for free. I still make plenty of bodysuit textures, check out my store here and at poserpros sometime.

Thanks, I do have some of your body suits, but I am trying for a spefic look/patter and wondering if anyone has any hints or ideas for software. Thanks for all your advice.

I use Adobe Illustrator and PhotoShop to create almost all of the textures I've done. The combination of vector and raster applications works pretty well for me. Then of course, there's applications like Deep UV that's specificly for this type of stuff. Doug