Attached Link: Moe's original Lightwave render

Wowowowowow!!! :o) The "retro-diner" look is simply amazing! I really like how it will work either as grungey bar in the bowels of Dystopia or some surrealistic anime environment. Absolutely awesome work. Well done, my friend. :o) Cheers! M

Thanks, Moe :-) Very glad you like it!

Looks like something I could use. :) Jay

With that checkboard texture, the circular table looks like it could have other uses, as well. "Horsie to Pointy Guy 6."

Looking very spiffy! I am very excited that this project is still in the works! Can't wait to see this when it is all done! Shogakusha

mmmmmmmmmmmmmhhhhhmmmmm Hyperion Bar....

well done Ajax, excellent texuring work, I love it mate

"So far, there are no Poser 4 style textures for any items." You are going to make Poser4 textures?...I hope. I've been waiting since 2002, please tell me you're making Poser 4 textures. :O(

Well, the point of doing all this UV mapping is so that it will be possible to do P4 textures and I certainly planned to do some originally. OTOH, I can see already that it won't be possible to make them look nearly as good as the P5 textures and with P6 just about to come out I'm starting to think that it's not really fair to all the P5/6 customers to have to bear the cost of P4 textures that they'll probably never use anyway (especially since I can run up half a dozen P5 texture sets in the time it takes me to do one P4 texture set). So I'm considering selling the P4 textures as a separate pack. On the other other hand, we plan for this one to go to DAZ and they tend to like P4 compatible stuff still. On the other other other hand, DAZ does have a history of selling a model and its textures separately, so it could go either way. I think it's safe to say there will be P4 textures. Just not sure if they'll be part of the basic product or whether they'll cost extra. Also, if they wind up being sold separately then I might ask somebody else to do them (like Stonemason if he's interested).

Stonemasson could do some stunning work on the textures, he is one of the best texturer's for this kind of scenary I've seen. The only thing I'd say about the lack of P4 textures is if you transfer the Poser file to another program (poseray, Bryce, Vue etc) the model will probably be untextured or misrepresented in the conversion. I, like others, don't use Poser as a final product renderer. best wishes Jody

I have Propack, will there be Propack Textures?

Jarm, That's true, but it's also true that a lot of people who render in Vue or Bryce etc say they do it so they can use the procedural textures of those programs, so having P4 textures shouldn't matter so much for that. Phily, P4 and PP use the same textures so there'll either be both in the basic pack or both will be in an add-on pack.

Ajax? Are you saying those are done with P5 shader nodes and not with JPGs? Is that why it is faster to do?

Exactly

Actually, the one on the right does use a couple of jpegs, but they're just small ones that can tile seamlessly and I've used P5 to tile them across the surfaces.

Well i kinda expected the computer screens to still be images but i wasn't sure if you used jpgs anywhere else. I dont know if you will know this or not, but do scenes/objects based entirely (or almost entirely) on shader nodes render faster or easier than images based on jpgs?

Yep, the screens are jpegs in both versions. The tex scheme on the right has a simple metal jpeg tiled over the brown metal parts and a simple leather jpeg tiled over the seat and table top. They're the same sort of jpegs you find in the city blocks. The UV mapping isn't designed for tiling though. It's just that with P5 you can tile the textures anyway. Sometimes a scene with mostly procedural textures is faster to render, sometimes it isn't. Some procedural shaders can be very slow to calculate and others are very fast. Large jpegs tend to take a long time to load just before rendering but once they've loaded they render pretty fast. Procedurals have zero load time but can get slow during the actual render if they invole complicated nodes. The really important thing is that Poser tends to "choke" if you load too many high res jpegs in one scene. It can crash, refuse to render or render with some textures missing. Poser 4 does that too. P5 doesn't choke on procedurals though. I'm thinking most people will want a few Vickis and Mikes in their bar scene, plus clothes. That's probably going to mean a lot of textures before you even start counting the bar textures. For a large object like the bar you have basically three options: you can use very very high res jpegs to try and get detail; you can restrict the jpegs to things like screens, signs, lables etc and use procedurals everywhere else, maybe with some low res jpegs to drive the procedurals and control which areas show wear etc, or; you can use a heavily tiled UV mapping tile some low res jpegs across it. I prefer to avoid the very high res jpeg approach because of the choking issue. With P4, I think the best thing you can do is tile the UV mapping and use the low res jpegs tiled across the surface, but a lot of customers hate that, partly because you lose the ability to add specific details to specific areas and partly because a lot of them just don't really understand the concept of tiled texturing (they want UV templates they can look at and understand). I got tired of getting complaints and questions about the tiled approach, so though we do use that for the Dystopia City blocks, I've pretty much rejected it for anything else. The mostly-procedural approach seems to have a lot of advantages to me. That way I can keep the jpegs to a minimum and just use them for sceens etc or tile small pictures across areas where that's appropriate. So Poser won't choke but I also get to keep the intuitive UV template. And that means I can use a low res jpeg to control which areas show wear and tear, but make the actual wear and tear procedural, so I get high detail without the big jpegs. It's also faster to set up, which means I get the project finished faster and it's easier for me to make alternative colour schemes, since I can do it by just tweeking a few nodes... and (bonus!) making another colour scheme doesn't have to mean eating up another 20 Meg of the end user's hard drive. I could include a whole bunch of colour schemes without having much impact on the zip size. So to sum up, procedurals might be faster to render or might be slower depending on exactly how they're constructed, but the key thing is that they won't make Poser choke and if they're done right they'll look just as good as or even better than a really high res texture would.

send us a copy when the UV's are done Ajax..I'd be happy to look into texturing it. are there any bottles,drinking vessels etc?

Will do, Stef. Yep, there are some bottles that go on the shelves in the bar (about 18 different ones, I think), but no glasses.

Bartender...leave the bottle.

Oh yeah! This looks sweet Ajax! Looks like you're putting some overtime into this! Thanks for the update!

any progress? I'm dying for a drink

Some progress, but very slow. I'm working on textures and finalising the cr2 files.

...Also trying to sort out some P6 issues. Now that P6 is out, I want it to work in that as well. Drop me a note if you want more detail, Stef.

Ajax I'd be happy to help out with P6 testing if necessary. I like Stonemasson am desperate for that drink. Best wishes Jody

Thanks Jody, but it's not really testing that's the problem. The bar was one of the meshes Moe made before he started optimising stuff for Poser, so the mesh has a lot of wierdness in it that Poser finds difficult to deal with. Billy did a good job of conveting it to obj but even after I though he had everything ironed out and gave him the all clear, I kept finding bits I hadn't noticed before, and each new version of Poser exposes more hidden wierdness in the mesh. When I find bits that are bad, I pretty much have to re-build them and sometimes that involves having remap large sections as well. It's just a very slow and frustrating process. I'll get there some day though.

Ajax, if your still having problems with the model, send the mapped one back over, I've got a few new techniques for sorting out the problems with the meshes, the same ones I used on the last set of city blocks, there seems to be less problems with the last lot of conversions than any of the previous ones, and this new way keeps all the UV mapping intact as well, coz it doesn't remove any of the points in the model. Cheers Billy