Does anybody know a good way to add an insignia patch to a clothing item? It's not always enough to simply paint onto the image map of the clothing, since often the general clothing item is a bit low-poly for fine detail. Can you add a high-poly patch to a clothing item and have it conform with it? Thanks--T

maybe by UVMapping..but you'd have to know how (UVMap classic is free, and Wings 3d will do it as well)

Should be possible. You might try something like this; 1) using the Group tool in Poser, slice off a patch-shaped part of the clothing mesh. 2) export this as a new object. 3) load up the free UVmapper and make a new map for the patch, flattening it and filling as much of the map as possible. 4) back into Poser, import the new patch and either; a) set it as a smart prop with "inherit bending from parents" selected, or b) export a new .obj file including both the base clothing item AND the new patch. Go into a text editor and change the "g" statement of the patch to be the same group as the underlying clothing body part. Make sure the patch has a unique "usemtl" statement. Okay, a somewhat simpler solution is to open the clothing item's object file in UVmapper, select the part of the clothing where the patch is, expand that to fill the map and change the material name of that selection. Save the new object, replace the old object in your Runtime directory and delete the rsr. Now you have two texture maps; the original, which now contains a small hole, and a new map, which is concentrated on the patch. Lastly, and the neatest solution, is to pick up the free modeller Wings and make your own patch. Then proceed as above.

Thanks, pakled and nomuse--sounds like I need to learn some new software! I'll look into these. --T

Here's a quick example ... I'm going to place a brand-name logo on the front of this vest.

Much like a transmap, the light areas of the mask will tell Poser which parts should be visible.

Both images should be the same size. I don't have an alligator handy, so this stylish dragon silhouette will have to do.

A blender node is used to merge the two textures. The original texture is plugged into Input1, and your patch texture is plugged into Input2. The mask is plugged into the Blending channel, with its value set to 1.

Use the image node's Scale and Offset values to adjust the size and position of the patch texture, so it overlaps the the original texture properly. These values will be different for each clothing item; you'll have to experiment. Set Image_Mapped to "Clamped" to prevent the texture from tiling or repeating.

Your scale/offset settings must be identical for both texture and mask.

Wow, so many ways to tackle this problem. Thanks, Little Dragon, for the tut! I'll give this a try, too. --T

Nice, little dragon. I knew layers were supported in P5, but I wasn't sure about doing an offset of a small/non-tiled image map. Actually, I've been intending to experiment on this to add unit insiginia to my robot. Definately, this is the easiest way.

Excuse me while I go kick myself. That's a neat trick. You could extend the principle to make multiple badges, or buttons. Small texture maps, and a chain of blenders. Buttonmaps A and B go into Blender 1. Blender 2 combines the Blender 1 output with Buttonmap C. I used the same sort of chaining idea to make a 3-colour Trek-style uniform, which also used a different material style for one component (Babylon 5 is maybe a better example to use).

I used the "Blender" method for adding an image patch to an existing texture, which works great for getting a high-resolution image, but is there a way to keep the mesh from distorting the image? The logo in the attached image is supposed to be round.

Thanks--Tim

Simplest way is to pre-distort the image in Photoshop.  Most figures, be they clothes, people or whatever, will distort a regular image to a certain degree.  The trick is in learning where the distortions occur and correcting them beforehand.

For human models and some clothes, SnowSultan's seam guides are invaluable.  The best solution I can suggest for anything else is to make your own templates with UVMapper and customize them by painting guidelines over the area you want to add a logo to, then render that version to see how much distortion occurs.

Check this thread

http://www.superheroinecentral.com/mrx/xpage/decaltutorial/decaltutorial.htm

Thanks again--Tim

While I remember, you know you can make circles with a Tile node? And if you make the Mortar really wide, you can have just one small circle visible in UV space.

Does the tile compensate for the distortion of the mesh? That was my real problem.--Tim