I am no Material Room/Node expert, but I have been playing around in the Material Room today. I got Sixus1's Small Crawler figure because it was on sell (see the Product Showcase Forum). I wanted to do some (simple) re-texturing of Crawler and place him in a hell-like environment. I reviewed the products at several sites, but they did not suit my concept. So, I decided to try the material room.

I came up with some settings for the GROUND and a Skydome (made from the Poser 7 – Props – Primitive - Ball Hi-Res). I think they look very decent (but they need FireFly set to use displacement). I used the standared lights so obviously some of the colors would need to be adjusted for more hellish lights.

I have several questions. I was almost set to share my PZ3 of this scene when I realized that this would share the geometry of the GROUND prop and the Hi-Res Ball. I thought that might create a copyright problem? Would it be a better idea to share the material (MT5) files?

Would it be all right to upload a zip of the MT5 files with a JPG of the render settings I used and a render of the scene to ShareCG, and put a link to the file here? If several people tried it out and pronounced it usable, I could upload a version later to the Freestuff at Renderosity (providing I can figure out how to package it so that it would unzip to the right place in a Poser 7 runtime).

I have included a small render of my own personal hell with this message. (I hope this doesn't need a Content Advisory for Language).

LMK

I asked e-fronteir a while back if it was ok to use the primitives to make items to share & they said....

*Quote - "Greetings Ann,

Thank you for your message and support of Poser. As long as you are not
selling the jewelry, we are fine with you sharing your modified content
based from the primitives.

Best regards,
-Legal"*

If that helps - see this thread HERE

As long as you're planning to share this as a PZ3 file, it would not include the geometry.  There would just be entries calling for the geometries to be loaded from the user's runtime.  I see no problem.

John

1/21/08

I have been trying to scale and texture a Poser 7 – Primitive – Cylinder to use as a dais. Can some one tell me why the ends separate from the tube when a displacement map is used? Can this be fixed?

I am beginning to think I need to get a freeware modeler to make my own primitives. Surely I could handle some simple primitives. Is "Wings" freeware? Can one distribute (even sell) work created with a freeware program?

LMK

Quote - 1/21/08

I have been trying to scale and texture a Poser 7 – Primitive – Cylinder to use as a dais. Can some one tell me why the ends separate from the tube when a displacement map is used? Can this be fixed?

I am beginning to think I need to get a freeware modeler to make my own primitives. Surely I could handle some simple primitives. Is "Wings" freeware? Can one distribute (even sell) work created with a freeware program?

LMK

Well, when you apply your displacment map my guess is your applying it to all sides of the the cylinder, which can cause some strange effects on occasion - to prevent this go into the group editor and setup 3 new groups, one for the rounded poriton of the cylinder and one for both the top and bottom of the cylinder.

Then use the group editor to create new material zones for each, and apply your displacement map to just the rounded portion of your cylinder.. that will probably get you much closer to the effect your looking for.

Hope that helps,
Stepdad

Here's an alternate cylinder object.  I've attached it as a TXT but it's
really an OBJ ... save it as CYL.OBJ then import it to Poser and resave
as a PP2.   Its edges are joined and slightly beveled, so it should behave
better with displacement than the native cyl, but it won't look 'sharp'.

And yes, you can redistribute and sell things made with freeware
modelers!

1/22/08

ockham, thank you for sharing! I will look the file over. I have downloaded Wings3d, and I will try to figure out how to make a round tiered dais. I suppose it is time I started learning how to do this kind of thing for myself.

BeyondVR is correct, a PZ3 file contains references to files in the runtime directories, and it does not contain geometry information, with one exception. RatCloset from E-F/SM/CP informs me that if one saves a scene that contains an object that has been imported, the PZ3 file will contain geometry information. He suggests importing an object to a blank scene and saving it to an appropriate runtime directory as a prop/figure/etc. The object can then be added to a scene from a runtime directory without geometry information being included.

None of the moderators/coordinators responded to my question about whether it was permissible to link to ShareCG files or not. I suppose it is okay to share files that way. I would love to get feed back about these materials and suggestions about improvements.

LMK