Attached Link: https://home.comcast.net/~eudoxus77/V3_PNG.zip

I went and started a brand new original texture for Vicki 3. It began as a pair of blank RGB 255,255,255 canvases, one for the head parts; one for the body parts, and I hand-painted the beginning of this, in Deep Paint 3D. Started with the included Skin texture, and went from there.
It's not so bad as-is, but it needs work. Well, OK, compared to a photo-tex, it's probably kinda lame. Given work and time, it'll look just fine. I'm sure it's a highly technical thing when people apply a photo to a UV map, but... :)
In any event, I'm still working on it, but I thought that other people who love texturing as much as I do might also enjoy having a shot at it.
It's "open source", in that I don't care what anyone who downloads it does with it. The whole idea is for people to alter it, if they want to, and then claim it as their own.
Bear in mind, this is a somewhat basic thing; it's far from complete.
All is explained in the Read Me text file.

Note that the download only contains textures for the body parts, and the head parts.
The render you see here is of the V3 figure with my texture applied to the body and head, but not the eyes, eyelashes, hair...the hair iz kozaburo's, as I'm sure you all recognize.

The pubic area is not part of the body texture, and is not included. That's not the V3 pubic, but a very hi-res prop I made and textured and trans-mapped.

I uploaded this into the Free Stuff, or so I thought I did, but it didn't show up. Don't know if I did something wrong....
Anyhow, it's at the enclosed link.

Hi, thanks for that - looks like it has some real possibilities - don't knock hand painted textures - some of the ones made from photos have shadows on the maps where they just wouldn't be in a "real" unwrapped skin. So I think there is still a place for both photographic and painted (or a combination of both) textures in Poser land.....

Well, I tend to use Lightwave, even for Poser characters, and, IMO, texturing is the way to go. O course, photos are not always readily-available, and there is a great need to do some editing anyway, like for bump, specularity, and Trans channels. Might as well paint the skin textures too, while I'm at it, I figure. I know photo textures are "in", but a good deal of CG characters are in fact "hand-painted".

If you submit something to the free stuff, it doesn`t appear right away, it takes a few days for it to be approved and then it will appear.

A few days? Really? Hell, I could get run over by a truck tomorrow in front of my house and never even know if anyone downloaded it and used it. ;) Why such a wait? Didn't used to be that way. shrug Thanks for the info though.

Well, it or something masquerading as it is up and I just downloaded it so thanks. I think the "waiting period" was implemented to try to weed out copyright infringement problems among other things perhaps.

Yup, thank Daz. I'd rather buy from Wal-mart than buy from that company.

Was the waiting period an idea of DAZ?

Nope. The freestuff moderators check out the link and make sure it works and doesn't contain a virus, before making the link public. Good policy IMO.

OK, that's what I thought, but post # 8 seems to imply that DAZ is behind it. shrug

Ya, well, Daz is seen as the Microsoft of Poserdom by some, the center of the axis of evil, responsible for the assassination of Abraham Dork and the Japanese attack on Vicki's temple.

LOL! OK, I get it! :)

I think another part is that the freestuff moderators get snowed under by offereings. I've noticed you'll get 'onsies and twosies' for a coupla days, then BLAMMO..a whole page worth of 'em..have patience.. once you're there, you can be there for years..;)

I downloaded this texture and I love it. Soon as I can find that pesky "map" of where things go on the V3 textures (you know, the one that has all the zones laid out and color coded so dummies like me can find stuff) and some decent lace and denim textures, I'm all for figuring out how to do stockings and body suits.

You can download the V3 texture templates for free from DAZ. The seam guides by SnowSultan are the best. Those are the color coded templates you're looking for.

I like the idea of Open Source textures - perhaps if you release another one could it be without makeup? Not complaining - just a suggestion.... It would make it a tad easier to modify into different styles

"perhaps if you release another one could it be without makeup? Sure, that's a good idea - I can do that easliy enough. Look for that sometime tomorrow - I'll probably upload it in the early morning...and when they get it approved it'll be there I'm also working on a texture for the M3 version of DAZ Michael. I needed an M3 texture real bad all of a sudden and didn't want to take the time to make one. (Of course, I'm not into buying someone else's textures) I searched, searched, searched some more...not just here, but with Google even. The only things I found were.... weird... or loaded with so many restrictions I wondered if I could even legally look at them. ;) So all that time I spent looking, I could have been making... Which is what I ended up doing after all. ;)

I'd really be interested in your settings for that skin in Deep Paint - I have never really had much success with the default skin in there - always seemed too red and darkish....

It varies, and I change it constantly.
If you're interested, a typical work flow I go through is thus:
1 Load the model into DP (duh)
2 I already have made suitably-sized blank white textures in Photoshop, to apply in DP.
3 In DP, as it's loading in the first dialogue, I select all the "Body" materials and Merge them. Makes it easier.
4 Do the same with the Head materials.
5 Delete the unnecessary materials.
6 Select the Skin texture and set it to a rather LOW opacity, a high Luminence, and a pale hue. "default" is too strong. Good for lobsters, bad for people.
7 Use the paint can to fill all, with All checked in the Fill thingy in the upper right

That's the prep work. From there, it's usually a matter of painting with airbrush, and the Skin texture at constantly varying settings.
Then it's refine, refine, and more refine....

A tip for the Skin Texture brush: It works best at very low strength and high luminence, low saturation. It works great in projection mode, as long as the button to paint unseen pixels is selected, and you constantly rotate the model on the Y axis.
But, as a finished product, it lacks, and i always do a huge amount of airbrushing to slowly bury it; it's just a starting point, basically.
Also, you can use any seamless tile for any of the "Texture" brushes, and I have scanned real skin before for this purpose. That's kind of hit-or-miss, though, and alot more work than airbrushing.

Message edited on: 11/26/2005 00:02

Message edited on: 11/26/2005 00:02

I just downloaded the textures. Good idea, this. I was working on something similar, but at a low pace. You saved me the fuzz.

Is there, by the way, a method to let all relevant materials refer to the right bitmaps in one go? I have been working down the Vicky's impressive list of materials and assigning them one by one, but a little script asking me which bitmap files are to be used for body, head, and transmaps would come in very handy if I make a variation on the bitmaps. It should be easy with a Python script, but I assume someone did this already.

Well, a MAT pose is a good alternative, which you can make either in a text editor, or with a program such as Mat Pose Editor. MPE is quicker than using NotePad, but still requires everything set up. It's faster than doing it in Poser, though. I don't know anything about scripting, but I don't think it could be done, unless all the textures were named as the script expected them to be; you'd probably have to write a new script for every new texture package, which would take even longer than doing it any other way. Of course, I'm no programmer, so I'm just ASSuming it would be that way. I got behind schedule on my next uploads, but I'll include MAT pose files for them.

Just thinking more on this open source idea. What I really think is missing out there is stuff like stretch marks, veins, stubble left by shaved legs and armpits or cellulite - just little things like that, that can add a touch of realism to a texture. Those things, for me at least, seem to be some of the hardest to create, I'm experimenting with veins at the moment and realism is a tough goal. I'm just wondering if anyone else has any ideas on what would be handy "items" we could throw out there to help this Open Source idea along a bit....

I got an IM from someone asking if I could do veins, and that's what got me behind, working on that.
I'd love to see the "open source" idea catch on - get more people involved in creating and not just buying and rendering.

As for "items", the best thing I could think of would be if alot of people altered it, used it in renders and uploaded the pictures, crediting the concept along with a link to either the original, or their own version of it, to get more people interested.
Alot of people have downloaded it, and if even a small percentage of those are working on it, that will make for alot of different interpretations, if they upload their results.

Message edited on: 11/26/2005 14:41