Hi all, I remapped V4 to take her into zbrush for displacement painting.
When doing this i asked myself why is there so little interesed in displacement options in "poser world" , with that i mean not just morphs or mesh adjustments but real displacement sculpting.
Looking in the marketplace i see the most beautiful textures,great morphs but not a single displacement map.
The same goes for the galleries, i see a realistic category with some very skilled people showing great pictures off good texturing,lightning etc. but never displacement. 
I'm just curious what the reason's could be why people don't take advantage of displacement.
The "poser meshes" can't be the reason cause there are some exelent meshes around.
Can this be a legal issue?
I'm curious off youre thoughts !!!!!
greetings all

No, it's that Zbrush has a very difficult learning curve, and going from "Poser "( A) to Zbrush and back again is a lot of guessing game work.

Hexagon promised easier displacement painting but it also has issues.

Also, displacement is great for soem things, but not so great for others, especially when you are combining it with morphs on a animatable figure, and you cannot see what's going on in preview.

In addition, adding a bunch of hi res displacement textures really eats up even more valuable resources.

There are a few great products over at Daz that use displacement (Stonemason released his first over a year ago now), but for figures and posing there are some compromises one needs to address.

Best combo for poser is actually morphs along with displacement mapping.

Hi gareee, thanks for your reply.
I understand what youre saying but  what i mean with displacement is not just painting bumpmaps that are used as displacement but a more "broader concept" off displacement.
It's not just poser related , i mean as a 3dsmax user i use "displacement sculpting " daily.
For example why does DAZ not provided a V4 version that can be used for displacement,
by that i mean a 1uv set version so that she can be used in Zbrush,Mudbox etc.
They do provide a RR,S3,A3,H3.D3,M3 etc.
I'm geeting the feeling by this that it's not suppossed to be used outside poser or DAZStudio.
Are they not interessed in a more "global" market ?

 

Multiple uv maps for single figures is very common. The whole idea is to put larger uv detail mapping where it's needed, and to decrease UV area that don't require as much detail. I've seen it in other apps as well as poser/DS.

You can easily shuffle around uv maps in uv edit pro, but when you are actually working on displacement or bumps maps on the figure, you end up wth the problem they were trying to solve.. not enough uv mapping detail where you want it (of the head), and too much on areas that don't need it.

It's just their solution to the problem.. I've seen many.

didn't one of the daz PA's make a new set of uv's for V4?..to be used in zbrush as a work around for multiple maps

"You can easily shuffle around uv maps in uv edit pro" That's my point , i have seen several messages with this explanation { No affence} but the real trouble in my opinon is that with the layout of the uv's created in earlier versions of the "unimesh" there where so many overlapping uv's that there was no point in trying to really fix it not just scaling it down to fit  in 1 uv space. With V4 this is much improved { just a few overlapping uv's} I think the great thing is that the mesh is all quads , I suspect daz is going for subdividing themself. What I'm disagreeing on is that with 1uv set you can't enough resolution in the places you want. I think it depends on the layout you create {still testing myself } Here's a map a created with gives good overall dispacement i think { critiques accepted}  

Klozen, I don't think it is so much that Daz, or any other vendor does not want their meshes used outside D/S or Poser, I think it is the inverse, that being that the meshes were originally created for D/S and Poser.

People who use higher end applications with sculpting abilities generally design their own characters or figure a work around to get meshes like V4 into their applications.

Meanwhile, the Poser market is full of users who are not interested or technically capable of sculpting their own figures and such.  This is what created a thriving marketplace for these meshes.

So, in other words, it is economics.  I don't know how many thousands of Poser users there are, but I know a lot more of them are going to buy V4 then all the 3D Studio Max, Maya, Z-Brush users combined.

It's not snobbery, it's just economics.

In the end, those who can use the high end applications to make cool stuff that we little people can use in Poser will always be welcome and encouraged to share their talents and visions.

Cheers!

Ah, I see (you posted while I was typing) what you are saying.

The thing (in the past P7 has kind of overcome this issue) with Poser is that when you load in a huge texture, it crashes.  A bunch of 4096X4096 textures would send Poser 6 and lower into a nose dive.

So, texture real estate in the Poser world is very valuable.  A 2048X2048 texture that has only a face on it is much more valuable to Poser users.  It uses less resources, but gives a higher resolution then a 4096X4096 that has every body part on it.

We need (or desire) high resolution for faces and hands, but not so much for knees and elbows.  That's why the body can be on a separate map for us.  Am I making sense?

Your template layout there would have to be a lot huger then Poser's resources could handle to give the same pixel width on the face alone.

Well, I hope this makes sense.

Cheers!

you have it right, thromm

**Hi ThrommArcadia,
**I Understand what youre saying.
The template i use in 3dsmax is 4096/4096 ,like u said :Your template layout there would have to be a lot huger then Poser's resources could handle to give the same pixel width on the face alone
I can do this because Max instanced the bitmap.
For poser i'm trying to split-up the bitmap's because like you said:A bunch of 4096X4096 textures would send Poser 6 and lower into a nose dive
Poser uses the same bitmap {for example "Body"} about 15 times to cover up the mesh because of several matregions right?
What if this could be split-up , by that i mean for example the fingernails require the complete bodytexture bitmap right ? 
If you would split the texturemap and give poser only the nail's portion of the map?
I'm a making sense ? 

poser loads only ONE map for all those items. with your idea, poser would need to load many more maps.

The target goal is to load as few maps as possible, yet still give priority to specific regiojns that need more detailm and are common places when detail is highlighted in renders.

daz really does design them as efficiently as possible for poser.

What Gareee said. (and much more efficiently then I would have!)

As I use C4D with iPP, I understand your problem. But if you use Max and ZBrush, I'm shure you can easily remap V4 yourself, do your displacement thing and then split up the texture for use on the Dazmaps, no?  Daz creates meshes for Poser and Studio. Not for other apps. Not yet, that is.

Hold up folks...

In this case, you can have your cake and eat it too. :).

There's no reason to 'scale it all to fit within a single 0.0<->1.0 UV space'.  A better approach is to 'tile' it into multiple UV spaces.  So in other words, the 'face' map would take up from 0<->1, then the 'torso' might be found one unit to the right, in the 1.0<->2.0 space and then the 'limbs' might be another unit to the right, in the 2.0<->3.0 space, etc.  (you can tile them out in any of 4 directions, including negative values).

Most (all?) apps will treat all of these "outside the range of 0.0<->1.0 UV space"  islands as if they existed in the 0.0<->1.0 UV space.

This solves the issue with Zbrush and the file still works fine inside Poser, C4D and likely most any other 3D app.

(shameless plug:  for C4D users, I have a plugin "Undertow" which has 'TileU' and 'TileV' commands in it to assist in thi type of thing)

klozen, to get back to your earlier question, I think Thromm has the general answer... there's no real reason not to use displacement maps, there's just noone (very few) doing them yet.  If you have skill in creating nice displacement maps, you could probably make good money selling character packages here in the marketplace.

Spanki that reply made my day !!
The multiple UV spaces is how i layout the uv's in 3dsmax ,but i always thought that poser
did not read multiple UV spaces. 
So thanks again for your reply.

btw I was asked by some people if i could share the uv's , could someone explain me if this is ok { legal} or how to do this ?
 greetings all.

So if you tile a uv map, how does the image save in zbrush?

And has anyone actually tried this in poser? How do you provide templates for "out of bounds"?

And do you end up with more or less actual mapps that you apply?

I've only seen tiling used in poser for textures you actually need to tile, like say, Faveral's building textures.

There are a couple of ways that you could share the altered UVs, but keep in mind that if the only thing you did was tile them, there's no need to share them.  You only need them tiled to work inside Zbrush, but they two .obj files (and UV sets) are 'functionally equivelent' otherwise. So after you have your displacment maps created, they would (should, at least) work on either the old or the new .obj file.  Now, if there were other changes you made (like some interior uv  polygons needed to be un-covered), then depending on how much of a change that really was, you might want to make he new UVs available.

First off, you can't just pass out the .obj file - that would fall under copyright.  But there are a couple ways that you could distribute your changes.

1. There are a couple programs (hopefully someone else will chime in with links) avaiable that are designed to 'encode' a file, so that it can't be used unless the person on the other end has the orignal file on thier machine.  I can't think of the name of the program off-hand, but 'pcf encoding' might be something to search on.  If you encode the new .obj file against the original .obj file, you could distribute it that way.

2. UVMapper (UVMapper.com) has a feature to save out only the UV data as a ".uvs file".  This file can then be loaded into other user's files to re-create your changes.

> Quote - So if you tile a uv map, how does the image save in zbrush? > > And has anyone actually tried this in poser? How do you provide templates for "out of bounds"? > > And do you end up with more or less actual mapps that you apply? > > I've only seen tiling used in poser for textures you actually need to tile, like say, Faveral's building textures.

 

Garee,

The UV coordinates are saved as floating point numbers, that are (usually) from 0.0 (top-left edge) to 1.0 (bottom-right edge).  When the value is > 1.0 or < 0.0, software wraps it around so that it essentually changes to the 0.0 to 1.0 range.  This is also how actual 'tiling' texturing works... the software grabs pixels until it reaches the 1.0 edge and if the next value is greater than that, it simply wraps back to 0.0.

So, in effect, it doesn;t really matter if these 'islands' of UV data are in the (default) 0.0 -> 1.0 space, or outside of it somewhere.  As long as you use even multiples of 1.0 (positive or negative), they're all treated the same.

The attached image shows a model set up this way in UVMapper Pro.. I simply zoomed the view out far enough to see the other tiles.  When you go to make texture templates, you probably want to move it back into the 0->1 space, but this would be more of a limitation of how that feature works (to get the white background, etc).  I hadn't verified this, but I'm guessing that it won't save a template for out of bounds UVs.

You end up with the exact same number of textures applied.  Basically, what I do is create UVMapper 'regions' for each island (one for face map, one for torso map, etc) and include whatever materials are used for that island.  Then you can select these 'regions' and move them around (I'm not sure if UVMapper has an easy way of doing the tiling though.. I use BodyPaint and my plugins for it).

...In other words - the .obj file for the image above with tiled UVs would use exactly the same textures as if all of those iles were glommed on top of each other in the default 0-1 space (the white square, in the center, above), and therefore, by etension, the same texture templates.

Ok, I can see how that would work then. You still have the same number of templates maps and arrangements, but they are all spaced out apart from each other, so you can just take them into zbrush.

Wonder if it works with modo 202, and mudbox as well?

You could remap her parts in layers, and, offset by say 100 for each part.  You'd get a long uv that uvmapper wouldn't take, though....but, you'd have the uvs for use in zbrush.  (I've done this for a lightwave dragon i made.  i wasn't happy though, as i couldn't get many details like that. 

I don't know, but I would assume so, yes.  Maya, C4D, Poser and apparently Max all do.

Spanki
The uv's are not just tiled alone , the where a few "nasty spots" did had to be fixed and offcourse there where still the notorious overlapping uv's which are fixed.
The map's work great now in zbrush even with displacementmap writing { Not even one crash!! }
the only thing zbrush can't do is multiple mapping but that's no problem.

Gareee:
The uv map itself doesn't tile it's the uv spaces in the map that tile.
You can use the same template's from daz and the same amount of textures
As spanki explaind poser seems to work as 3dsmax and reorders the uv's on top of each other.

Poppi, I'm not real familiar with tiling inside UVMapper (or Lightwave), but you could just add "1.0" to each, instead of 100.  Adding 1.0 is equivilant to bumping it over into the next tile.  Then you'd add 2.0 for the next one, then 3.0, etc if you wanted them strung out to the right.

Maybe if we submit this idead to Daz, it can become the standard for V4? it would make life easier for everyone invloved, and is a "win win" for everyone.

Gareee mudbox doesn't work well with poser meshes exept for V4 
Mudbox at the moment only likes quads

Quote - Spanki
The uv's are not just tiled alone , the where a few "nasty spots" did had to be fixed and offcourse there where still the notorious overlapping uv's which are fixed.

 

Ahh... then you might need to distribute the changes (might not though - I'd try your displacment maps on the default mesh and see if it's a problem).  I think that encoding program is "RTF Encoder" or something like that.

Garee, I think the only real reason Poser mesh files have typically been overlapping like that is for creating texture templates.  But once you have the templates, there's no real reason not to spread things out (except for when other people want to make some other sized template).

It's RTencoder. I've already directed the hoary eye os Sauron (er Daz) over here to take a look at what you are talking about.

Seems a worthwhile innovation that should be adopted for all figures.

Quote - Gareee mudbox doesn't work well with poser meshes exept for V4 
Mudbox at the moment only likes quads

There's a 3dsMax tool that does triangles to quads - I think it's polyboost

from what I read in the forums it seems tris & ngons are supported in Mudbox
multi uv's are also supported in Mudbox..& Zbrush.(in zbrush they have a multi uv displacement plugin)
jeffg3..I've got the 'Quadrify' plugin for Polyboost but have never managed to get it to do anything.

I have several freebies that make heavy use of displacement but more often that not I see them being rendered with the P4 renderer,& that's really dissapointing to see.

does P7 show displacement in reflections?

Good to know you caught this thread, SM.

Poppi, I'm not real familiar with tiling inside UVMapper (or Lightwave), but you could just add "1.0" to each, instead of 100.  Adding 1.0 is equivilant to bumping it over into the next tile.  Then you'd add 2.0 for the next one, then 3.0, etc if you wanted them strung out to the right.

yes, that's the same thing...but in lw you type in 100 instead of 1...sorry i wasn't clear.  i was trying to multitasik

StoneMason, unfortunately P7 still doesn't show displacement in reflections.  I usually only use Displacement lightly, so I can forgive it not showing up in most refections, but still, it is a disappointment.

Hi all
Would it be allright to share the uv's as a uvs file { I think that would be the easiest way for me to do}
Or must it be encoded somehow?

Yeah you should be able to do that, since the actualy mesh isn't being redistributed.

It would be best I think to put together more then just the uvs.. an explanation of how to create mat files for it, as well, and nailing down exactly what offsets should be done so this innovation can be utilized in other figures as well.

This has been a problem in poser content creation for a long time, and this seems a VERY simple solution, that's been just sitting around waiting to be discovered.

Hi Gareee
Here are the uv's i use , i still like to point out that i'm using these uv's in 3dsmax with zbrush and that they are working fine for my purpose.
However i don't think you should to much trouble using them for poser.
The Single_Space uv's are the one's i use myself and as you test them in zbrush you will find there's no more overlapping uv's { red in check uv's } after that check fix seams and you can even load the complete texture for V4 and paint the map or like i like to do "Sculpt from texture" 
 http://www.pixologic.com/zbrush/education/zclassroom/texturing-with-photo-ref.html
The displacementmaps are created fine now.
The Multi_spaces uv's are the same uv's as the single one only they are layout in the daz manor with the only difference that the uv's are not "stacked but spread" { hope that make sense} and ofcourse the uv's are all fixed.
It's really not a great discovery as you sad rather more a dirty job of cleaning up all overlaping uv's.
What you do find is that a lot of seams are stiched, cause zbrush see's them as overlapping also.
I also provided templates for the single uv's and i hope you give theme a try { i still like to hear if you think the quality is to low } 
The template also gives you a good idea what uv's have been fixed.
For the multi uv's you can still use the same daz templates 
I hope that "Stonemason" can give you a good direction for using The multi displacement exporter 2 from zbrush because i don't have that knowledge.{ hope to learn that from him to }
I hope you have a good idea of my explanation and i would love to hear your 'Experience's
"greetings
rapidshare.com/files/8186540/V4_uv_s.rar.html  

Quote - Hi Gareee
Here are the uv's i use , i still like to point out that i'm using these uv's in 3dsmax with zbrush and that they are working fine for my purpose.
However i don't think you should to much trouble using them for poser.
The Single_Space uv's are the one's i use myself and as you test them in zbrush you will find there's no more overlapping uv's { red in check uv's } after that check fix seams and you can even load the complete texture for V4 and paint the map or like i like to do "Sculpt from texture" 
 http://www.pixologic.com/zbrush/education/zclassroom/texturing-with-photo-ref.html
The displacementmaps are created fine now.
The Multi_spaces uv's are the same uv's as the single one only they are layout in the daz manor with the only difference that the uv's are not "stacked but spread" { hope that make sense} and ofcourse the uv's are all fixed.
It's really not a great discovery as you sad rather more a dirty job of cleaning up all overlaping uv's.
What you do find is that a lot of seams are stiched, cause zbrush see's them as overlapping also.
I also provided templates for the single uv's and i hope you give theme a try { i still like to hear if you think the quality is to low } 
The template also gives you a good idea what uv's have been fixed.
For the multi uv's you can still use the same daz templates 
I hope that "Stonemason" can give you a good direction for using The multi displacement exporter 2 from zbrush because i don't have that knowledge.{ hope to learn that from him to }
I hope you have a good idea of my explanation and i would love to hear your 'Experience's
"greetings
rapidshare.com/files/8186540/V4_uv_s.rar.html  

I grabbed the file, but am in the middle of a project, so I can't look at them yet.

You might think this isn;t much, but many people have lamented uaving overlapping uvs in poser figures, and bein gunable to use them easily in displacement painting applications, so this might be a nice breakthrough for everyone.

Guess sometimes you need to think outside the uv space, rather then the box...;)