Hey folks... wow, I sure seem to be posting a lot of threads lately! I'm slowly but surely delving deeper into my own little Poser world, and finding a lot of questions I just don't know the answer to, and here's the latest;
What are seam guides used for? I downloaded the freebie seam guide for Apollo Maximus, thinking that it would be something i could use as a guide to create textures. Something that would show me where certain parts of a texture would wrap around his body. I was hoping to create something like a mummy with him, and I'd need to see where each individual strip of cloth would wrap around from the front to the back of his body. That's just an example, though. What if I wanted to create a texture that had horizontal stripes across his legs? I'd need to make sure that the stripe on the front of his leg, wraps around correctly to match up with the stripe on the back of the leg, so that in an animation, as the view swings around from front to back, it looks like the same stripe. I hope I'm explaining it correctly.
But anyhow, the seam guide for Apollo, is smaller than the standard Apollo skin texture. So if I use the seam guide as a template to make a texture, it'll be smaller than Apollo and when I apply it, his eye textures will be on his chin and his nipples on his hips. So for that purpose, the seam guide is useless. Which makes me ask.... what is a seam guide used for?
Sorry that I wrote a book here, but can anyone explain it to me, please?
Thanks,
Arrowhead

Not sure which seam guides you are using, but get Snowsultans seams guides. They are color coded.

Fy

So, I'm on the right track though? That's what seam guides are supposed to be used for?

Yes. You are on the right track. Seam guides are used to create textures for characters, or in the case of clothing, textures for clothing, etc.

btw, as far as the size of the template, it will still fit the character regardless of size. Its the quality that will be less if the seam guide is very small.

Where can I find the ones from Snowsultan? I searched through renderosity, but i couldn't a match for that name

Attached Link: http://www.renderosity.com/mod/freestuff/index.php?user_id=856

See attached link.

Probably, the best way to look at seam guides, is to think of them as like those elevation charts / maps, where the lines get closer together, the steeper the land gets. You can find the James seam guides at CP. Lou.

For the record, it also does'nt mater what size the actual image file is, so long as the info is in the right place, relatively speaking. This is why it's possible to use a texture map of various sizes (1024x1024 or 4096x4096, for example) on the same object. Tihs makes thignsa useful if you're beginnig to ride the memory hard on your computer - you can put lower-res version of textures on objects which are further away from the camera. By doing this, you're using fewer of the computer's resources, and thus allowing it to do more.

Ok, so that sounded a little garbled, so here's an example. Let's say you have a crowd scene in Poser - 10+ models. Plus a bckground building, and maybe a few other props. They're all at different distance to the camera.Now, if all of these objects were high-poly, high-res textured, then most average level computers would choke on the render. BUT, there are ways to ease this choke point. You could use lower-poly models for the charactres further away (such as Dork and Posette, or the RR figures by DAZ) - fewer polys to calculate mens less memory used. Or, you can use smaller texture files - a 1024x1024 texture can be lodaed into memory and used in a 1/16th of the time that a 4096x4096 texture can! So all these things can reduce your overheads, making render times that littel bit smaller and easier to manage.

Incidentally, this is what computer games do on the fly - swap out low-res textures and models from the distance into higher res version as they get closer to the camera/player. This allows the game to show you as much of the game world as possible, without eating up too many resources as it does it.

JonTheCelt

Okay, well that makes sense. I just downloaded the seam guide for Apollo. I'll give it a go and see what happens!
Thanks everybody!

The seam guides are also known as a UV Map.  A UV Map is a 2D Representation of the surface area of a model.  It will tell you where each vertex related to another, in 2D.  

You can load any Figure/Model, into UV Mapper (A Free utility) and generate a UV Map.

This is how; Texture(usually skin but clothes/skin too), Transparency, Dissplacement, and Bump Maps are made.

To make the White Lingerie outfit, in this link; I just opened V3's UV in Photoshop, drew out a Transparency, and then applied it with the Material Room.