bagginsbill opened this issue on Apr 23, 2008 · 2832 posts
bagginsbill posted Wed, 09 July 2008 at 8:52 AM
Quote - Before reading your recent posts about how the VSS looks and sees what is plugged into where, I assumed that it looked for map names and placed them accordingly.
I thought you were on the brink of standardizing the whole Poser system of naming conventions for MAT products.
Alas, I guess not.
Actually I am trying to standardize the names. The what-is-plugged-into-what strategy is only for the case that we are using VSS in the one-click way. This situation demands that I analyze the target figure's existing shaders, and deduce the purpose of each image map.
On the other hand, when we switch to using map templates, the purpose of each will be explicitly and exactly based on the standardized names. You will not have to connect the maps to anything to set up a map template. You will simply identify the files you want to use.
The reason I did not offer this yet, is related to all this other talk about the buttons not working, and about how to do a nice and sophisticated graphical user interface. I do not want you to have to faff about manually adding image map nodes and setting the names.
Here is my plan:
You load a control prop that has various more complicated shaders.
Some of these shaders are partial shaders. They add on to other shaders. For example, we can have one that does body hair, and this partial shader is written by itself as a template. It does not get mixed into the skin shader by you. That mixing and assembling will be done by VSS, where you get to load a skin shader, a hair shader, and suntan lines shader, a tatoo shader, etc.
VSS will scan all these shader templates and figure out what control map image files you'll need.
You tell VSS you want to fill in the control map files. It builds you a nice GUI, tailored to the actual shaders you have loaded.
You then use the GUI to assign images to each named map, once per UV zone. For example, for a James or Jessi, there are only two UV zones - head and body. So you would fill in two maps for each effect. On the other hand, V4 has 7 UV zones. You would fill in up to 7 maps for each effect. However, V4 eye shaders probably won't need a hair map. (LOL) So VSS would know that, and not even ask you what hair map you want for the eyes.
After you fill in all the map file names (using browse buttons of course), then VSS will store all that information in the control prop, inside the special materials whose purpose is to keep track of the map templates.
Once you have such a control prop set up for a particular figure, you can save it. For example, you'd save one for Apollo, that includes all the pre-defined map assignments based on all the effects you've chosen to use as well as all the files you've already selected.
In the future, you could load the prop, and then if you wanted to just change the hair map, you'd bring up the GUI again, and select new files for hair maps, leaving all the others alone.
That's the plan. But until I get the GUI crap worked out, the only way to use the UV map template features would be for you to tediously create a map zone for each of the UV sections, and then manually populate them with Image_Map nodes, rename them by hand, and then load the desired image into each. This would be a very lengthy and error-prone process that I really don't want to advocate or support. I'd rather have VSS take care of it all behind the scenes, and just give you a nice clean GUI to fill out.
Renderosity forum reply notifications are wonky. If I read a follow-up in a thread, but I don't myself reply, then notifications no longer happen AT ALL on that thread. So if I seem to be ignoring a question, that's why. (Updated September 23, 2019)