Hi there!

I have a Problem:

I`ve implented Tattoos on a Bodytexture.

The Tattoo was Highres...... everything looked GOOD!

In the Materialroom i choosed the Texture... and it fit good.

Then i rendered with this settings:

After rendering i got THIS:

This is UNSHARP as hell.....

Has anybody a tip what i do wrong, or how i can make this BETTER?

Big thanx in advance!

Ray Factor

Try turning off Texture Filtering, and lowering the Min shading rate to less than 1.

in addition, i would up the max texture size all the way

Just a side note, the tattoo going onto the actual belly button would hurt like hell :)

Only one raytrace bounce? Turn that slider all the way up. :-)

set min shading rate to 0.00 and max texture size to 4096 or whatever the maximum is.

also, keep in mind that even the freshest tattoos are never pure black, nor are they so sharp around the edges. they are being viewed under 1/16" of translucent skin.

Only tried a tatoo once and did it the same way you did. Mine worked OK, but I rendered with P4 render. Yes Blackhearted, it was too clearly defined, maybe I needed to "blur" or "reduce contrast" it a bit, if you know what I mean. http://excalibur.renderosity.com/mod/gallery/index.php?image_id=1253701

Quote - Only one raytrace bounce? Turn that slider all the way up. :-)

Why?  It's not like he has 50 mirrors in the scene. 
If all he is doing is using raytraced shadows
or AO one is plenty.  If he isn't doing any raytraced
functions he doesn't even need raytracing checked.

OTOH I would suggest he increase the pixel samples
in addition to the other suggestions.

Personally, I would have done the tattoo on a white background and used it to control a blender node. That way, it could be used with any skin texturemap. A little blur at the edges would be more controllable with a plain background, and you could still mix in some noise in Poser, as well as being able to tweak the colour. Also, you could use a relatively low-resolution skin texture, and still have high-resolution for the tattoo. If you use a sub-surface scattering system, as Face-Off devised for P5, and as is included in P6, I suspect you'd get a better look if the scattering was reduced for the tattooed skin (or completely eliminated for body paint on top of the skin). [Extra Thought] The image_map node in P5/6 lets you scale a texturemap to cover a small part of UV-space (there's an example in my Gallery), and if you have a symmetrical pattern, you can also do a left-right mirroring. The Poser limit of 4096 pixels is on the texturemap, and UV-space has higher resolution. Making a couple of assumptions, the left-side and right-side could use the same texturemap, with the flip, scaling and positioning, with the navel area from a second map. It might be easier to just make the one map in Photoshop, but unless you want P4 support you can still reduce the memory load by cropping the texture and using scale/position.

I tried to apply tatoo on V3 with the blender node but it change the color of the texture aside the tatoo. I failed in using PNG and GIF with an alpha channel, I don't know if Poser supports it...

So I used the color_math node with the MIN function, as the black tatoo appears to be the min color. With that function the main texture is not changed in color. My tatoo is JPEG with white background.

The tatoo has to be adjusted to fit the desired place and it's difficult to make fine adjustments.

Also when I decrease the size, the tatoo is displayed several times, I don't know how to avoid that.

There's three controls on the Blender node: two colour boxes and a numeric box. You would have one colour box set to white, and connect the normal texture. The other would be set to the tattoo colour. The numeric box defaults to 0.5. It should be set to 1, and the tattoo "control" texture connected. That numeric box default still catches me sometimes. You might get slightly better results with a value slightly less than 1, expecially if you have some variations of skin-tone in the tattooed area, and the tattoo colour is a bit lighter.

Quote - Also when I decrease the size, the tatoo is displayed several times, I don't know how to avoid that.

If you're using an image map node to load it, change Image_Mapped from Tiled to something else (like None), the default is set to "Tiled".

I was happy to make tattoo with Poser but when I import my character into Vue, I lost all the tattoo :(

So I'm trying to make them in Vue now => hard to get into the texture editor beast !

PS:
thanks for the "tiled" advise
I failed again with blender node but it's not so important since I make the same with the color_math

Just to toot my own horn, here was a script I wrote using Bagginsbill's Matmatic
and Parmatic put a tattoo on Jessi.  It lets you add a tattoo and a skin texture and
then creates parameter dials that let you scale the tattoo in the x and y direction
and move it in the x and y direction.  Makes it a lot more simple than fooling around
with Photoshop or messing around with blender nodes.
Just cut and paste below to notepad and save it as tatto.mm1.txt
Then fire up Matmatic to create your MT5 file, apply it to your character,
run Parmatic, and start spinning them dials.

 
# You'll need to supply your own tattoo.  
# And the proper directory path.  
# Make sure the background of the tattoo is white  
# or it won't work.  
# But this will let you easily scale and locate the tattoo  
# If you want to use it on another character, substitute that  
# character's texture map and directory path.  
        
cx = Add(.4).labelled('PM:xloc')        # X offset parameter dial  
cy = Add(.4).labelled('PM:yloc')        # y offset parameter dial  
xscale = Add(.2).labelled('PM:Xscale')  # scale parameter dial  
yscale = Add(.4).labelled('PM:Yscale')  # scale parameter dial  
 
tat = ImageMap("Mystuff:Runtime:Textures:Tattoos:Chinese Dragon color.png")  
tat.U_Offset = cx  
tat.V_Offset = cy  
tat.U_Scale = xscale  
tat.V_Scale = yscale  
tat.Image_Mapped = 0  
 
clr = ImageMap("Poser 6:Runtime:Textures:Poser 6 Textures:Jessi_Body.jpg")  
 
clr = Color_Mul(clr, tat)    # Combine the skin texture with the tattoo  
 
s = Surface()            # Set up the Surface  
s.Diffuse_Color = clr  
s.Specular_Color = BLACK