Y'know, I'm sure this is easy enough... but I must be missing something.

I have a character who needs a corporate logo on his shirt. Very nice, okay. With the shirt selected and everything else made invisible, I go to the Group Edit palette. I select a bunch of polygons on the shirt's chest element, I make a new list, I assign my material (properly, as far as I can tell). Then I go to the Render > Materials palette. Very nice, my list is there, and my material is there, and I apply my material using the logo I've saved off from Photoshop... and the bloody thing doesn't show up. Or, rather, the shirt shoes up as before, but no logo. I do see a very ghostly sort of image of part of it. Which make me wonder if I have screwed up some sort of size differential setting somewhere.

My logo file is 219px x 108px. Is this way too large for the chest polys I have selected? I have tried to make the logo smaller, but that doesn't work either. Once made smaller, nothing of the logo shows up at all.

Should I try to create a texture for the entire shirt (which I don't know how to do) and map the logo to the front of it?

I should say that I followed Dr. Geep's tute on Group Editing, so I am not trying to do this in the dark (knowing that the manual for P4 is a bit unclear on this matter).

Anyway, thanks again for helping to pull my chestnuts out of the fire.

Artie

Message edited on: 06/03/2004 15:40

Hi ArtWorker, I am not sure you need to use the Grouping Tool to do what you want. I have not reposted this tut yet, but if you are interested, I will repost it next. cheers, dr geep ;=]

I've seen that ghostly effect before. It could mean that Poser is trying to superimpose your group-material on the main cloth. Actually, texturing the entire shirt will work better, and it's not hard once you get used to the steps. You need UVmapper (the free version) and a decent 2D program like PaintShop. There's a tutorial on the UVmapper site http://uvmapper.com/uvmaptut.htm that will take you through the stages pretty well.....

Zounds! Crossposted again. This seems to happen amazingly often; not immediate crossposting, which would be understandable, but two answers coming simultaneously, several hours after the original question. It's way beyond random odds.

You need to place the logo on a larger image. It has to be placed with reference to the UV template for the shirt. That means the first thing you need to do is find the UV template for the shirt. You can use the free version of UV mapper to extract the template from the obj file associated with the shirt. You may be able to find the template somewhere else, depending on which shirt it is.

Make that three, Ockham. I crossposted too ;-)

It all sounds good, and I even think I know what youse are talking about! Texturing the entire shirt would probably be a better solution for me. I'll give UVMapper a whirl. Dr. Geep, thank you, yes, I would love to see that tute. This is a great group -- very helpful and clever folks.

If there is already a texture for that shirt, it is even easier. :) For example, there are lots of textures in free stuff for the P4 figure's t-shirts. Looking at one of them all laid out in PhotoShop you can see where the design goes, and looking at that same shirt on the character you can see how it lines up on the body. Trot back to PhotoShop, add another layer and change the shirt color. Tuck your logo on the shirt. Save off a nice clean .jpg of the new shirt, which you can then load in the Material window. If you follow Dr Geep's tutorial, OTOH, you will learn a lot more, and how to do it correctly. Most important, how to do if there isn't already a nice template or map to layer over. I've done some t-shirts and coffee cups to help promote a game I co-designed... so here we have the game cover applied as a logo on the green t-shirt, and Little Dragon's furrette's trying to get the shirt off his back. Once you have a template to follow, applying your design is pretty straightforward. Carolly

Thanks, Carolly -- I'll give that a try, too.