big render and busy this afternoon or I'd do a test :(

Nope and I'm not planning on using him either to be honest.  For the rare occasions I use a male in a render, M3 does fine at the moment

Don't know what I'm doing wrong but can't pull him in.

probably a Runtime issue as he needs to be in same directory as Poser.exe? :/

I agree with Frank, I also have no plans of using M4. From the images I saw, I hated his face. Maybe some nice morph will come along in the future but his default look is simply awful, IMO. I also have no real motivation to leave M3.

Just a quick render, but he seems to import into Vue fine.

Kewl! :)

Rutra,
some of the morphs are very nice ;)

Haven't been playing with Vue lately, can someone give a quick rundown on getting M4 in? I have other characters that were saved to a separate directory that I have no problem bringing in so can't figure out why he won't work as I saved him to the same directory as the others that do.
coffee, I need coffee............

 has he got a crack on his left shoulder, or is that just a shadow?
Love esther

I did a three fold test too yesterday.

• Michael 4 import in Vue
• Install of SkinVue on my 64 bits OS
• Test of Skinvue for M4

I hope we will soon have decent medieval clothing for him, apart from the existing Valiant for M4. I also think I will be missing products like the ones of John Malis (Viking, RPG series) and will probably stick to M3 for many of my scenes.

I'd like to add one thing : the texture I used for M4 in Poser (mid res one from M4 complete) give his skin a yellowish tint in Vue. The use of skinvue solves the problem.

Very nice looking M4 indeed offrench.  Here's a test of him in SkinVue 7.  I think he's better that M3 but I still prefer Apollo Maximus for the guy stuff

Offrench,
yeah I love John Malis' stuff and DAZ said they are not gonna do an M3 to M4 conversion, GAH!!!!

Well, I managed to install M4 with no problems, and imported to vue fine as well. But it doesnt seem to play nicely with SkinVue, even after downloading the new daz plugin. The top part of my image shows M4 with the simple resolution textures(all I have at the moment), rendered in Vue. Not a very nice color, but looks OK. Middle image is after swapping the txtures using Vue6 (for Mac). with no further adjustments. Lovely color but the hip and top of the tighs are obviousely wrong. I did some exploration in the  function editor and discovered the source: Before the swapping the hip used the map "M4Smpl_malebody". After the swap it uses the map "M4Smpl_bodybald.jpg". The tighs have a similar problem, they use 2 maps, one is for the limbs (for the bottom part) and one is supposed to be "M4Smpl_malebody" again. M4Smpl_bodybald.jpg is much shorter and doesnt cover the hip and tigh areas. (No idea why) and thus leaves a gap in the converted materials. I replaced manually, in the function editor,  the 'bald' map with the 'male' map and that indeed solved the problem - as seen in the bottom part of my image. Lovely color, no gaps:)

I dont know why the two maps do not correspond to the same areas, or why  skinvue didnt use the map I started with, but I'm hopping that its easy to fix, becuase I dont want to do it manually every time.

Another problem occurs  if the genitals are present. I dont seem to  have a texture map for them, just a color. so upon swapping skinvue replaces it with the 'missing.jpg' texture.

(PS - these problems may be a specific to the simple textures and not the high resolution ones?)

i found that if you don't have the M4 base and morphs in the same folder as say, clothing, it buggers the morphs up!!

so, person on DAZ3D helped :)
to install V4 and M4 in their own seperate runtimes, just install as a DAZ STUDIO install but in your chosen runtime!
it works, woot :)

oh the pants = wrong is a known problem, it's due ot poor explanation, iirc, can't recall the detials, like, load the other "Pose material" setting, not the one you'd expect. or some such.

Silverblade:
Was your last post supposed to answer my problem or is it a general information?
I cant see how it relates to me. I have no problem with M4 in poser. I have no problem with him in vue either, as seen in my top image. The problem occurs only when I use Skinvue.
(M4 is installed in the main p7 folder, all the materials are kept in the same folder, I havnt changed anything.)

Quote - Well, I managed to install M4 with no problems, and imported to vue fine as well. But it doesnt seem to play nicely with SkinVue, even after downloading the new daz plugin.
The top part of my image shows M4 with the simple resolution textures(all I have at the moment), rendered in Vue. Not a very nice color, but looks OK. Middle image is after swapping the txtures using Vue6 (for Mac). with no further adjustments. Lovely color but the hip and top of the tighs are obviousely wrong.
I did some exploration in the  function editor and discovered the source:
Before the swapping the hip used the map "M4Smpl_malebody". After the swap it uses the map "M4Smpl_bodybald.jpg". The tighs have a similar problem, they use 2 maps, one is for the limbs (for the bottom part) and one is supposed to be "M4Smpl_malebody" again.
M4Smpl_bodybald.jpg is much shorter and doesnt cover the hip and tigh areas. (No idea why)
and thus leaves a gap in the converted materials.
I replaced manually, in the function editor,  the 'bald' map with the 'male' map and that indeed solved the problem - as seen in the bottom part of my image. Lovely color, no gaps:)

I dont know why the two maps do not correspond to the same areas, or why  skinvue didnt use the map I started with, but I'm hopping that its easy to fix, becuase I dont want to do it manually every time.

Another problem occurs  if the genitals are present. I dont seem to  have a texture map for them, just a color. so upon swapping skinvue replaces it with the 'missing.jpg' texture.

(PS - these problems may be a specific to the simple textures and not the high resolution ones?)

Hi ArtPearl,

Here's the deal with M4.  SkinVue uses the map it finds in the M4 2_SkinTorso material for the body.  With the low res M4 Maps, DAZ uses a couple different maps for the hip which causes the discontinuity.  My advice is to not use the low res maps - they are pretty bad anyways.  If you use the low res maps, use the 2_SkinToroso map for the 2_SkinHip material.

As far as the genitals are concerned, yes you must use a map for this if you swap using "Enhanced" mode.  Otherwise just use "Procedural Mode.  (which will produce better looking results than the low res DAZ maps anyways). 

Thanks for the quick response, Dave.
Well, I agree it will be nicer to have the higher resolution maps, but I dont. Since the fixup for skinvue just specified it will work for  "M4" and not that it will work ONLY for "M4 with high resolution"  I assumed it will work for the base M4. Silly me.
Your advie for a work around isnt actually acurate. 2_SkinTorso is the one that has the reference to the wrong map (or rather the map that doesnt include the hip). It uses the 'bald' map. This is OK for all other torso parts but NOT the hip.
A working 'work-around' would be to edit the material  2-SkinTorso and replace the texture map 'bodybald'  with the map 'malebody'. After that using Skinvue gives a skin with no gaps, I tried it.

As for the genitals - I already worked it out that I can use the procedural mode. Couldnt SV itself figure it out and if a map is missing use a procedural mode? a skin with crossed out circles is definitely of no use. (although a warning message would be nice)

Be that as it may, if you are going to state that SV with the new daz pluging works for M4 it should not  need work arounds, it should be transparent to the user. Maybe it isnt worth your time to fix it properly, but then you should have a very clear disclaimer, so people like me do not waste their time.
Finally, I just want to make clear - I really love skinvue or I wouldnt have tried so hard to get it to work. So thanks for the produt and for your patience:)

ArtPearl,
sorry, general info :)

Quote - Thanks for the quick response, Dave.
Well, I agree it will be nicer to have the higher resolution maps, but I dont. Since the fixup for skinvue just specified it will work for  "M4" and not that it will work ONLY for "M4 with high resolution"  I assumed it will work for the base M4. Silly me.
Your advie for a work around isnt actually acurate. 2_SkinTorso is the one that has the reference to the wrong map (or rather the map that doesnt include the hip). It uses the 'bald' map. This is OK for all other torso parts but NOT the hip.
A working 'work-around' would be to edit the material  2-SkinTorso and replace the texture map 'bodybald'  with the map 'malebody'. After that using Skinvue gives a skin with no gaps, I tried it.

As for the genitals - I already worked it out that I can use the procedural mode. Couldnt SV itself figure it out and if a map is missing use a procedural mode? a skin with crossed out circles is definitely of no use. (although a warning message would be nice)

Be that as it may, if you are going to state that SV with the new daz pluging works for M4 it should not  need work arounds, it should be transparent to the user. Maybe it isnt worth your time to fix it properly, but then you should have a very clear disclaimer, so people like me do not waste their time.
Finally, I just want to make clear - I really love skinvue or I wouldnt have tried so hard to get it to work. So thanks for the produt and for your patience:)

Good comments Art Pearl.  I will look into the M4 more closely. but I don't think there is a straight-forward fix for this.  The issue centers on how to determine which map to use when there are multiple maps used for various body parts.  The only stock figure ever to use different maps for the body is M4 - and that is only for one variant of the low-res map injection.  I need to investigate this further and perhaps provide a fix on the Poser/DAZ studio side for this.  I still don't get why some texture map vendors don't composite all of the maps together to create a unified map.

I will also look into the warning message idea for the genitals mat.

Okay, I did some more checking on how the textures for M4 work (see the graphic).  Apparently, DAZ loads the top cuttoff version of the low-res textures when you first load M4 into a scene.  If however you inject the low-res textures from the supplied Pose file.  You get the non-cuttoff textures shown at the bottom which will work fine in SkinVue.  I will add this issue into the Plugin Documentation. 

Oh Dave -thank you!  This indeed is a reasonable solution.  Wouldnt have occurred to me Daz would use different textures for default and injected -cant begin to imagine why...
Also cant imagine why anyone would want to us the silly brief texture ever. So, I injected the low res textures, edited the 2_SkinHip material and replaced the smpl_brief with smpl_malebody. I saved the modified M4 as a new figure. So now I have an M4 figure that works in skinvue, and will work everytime I use this figure+textures, no additional workarounds required. Hurray- I'm a happy bunny.

Thanks Dave for finding a pragmatic fixup for things Daz srewed up.

PS - my revised M4 figure also has his genitals re-attached (who started this barbaric practice of detaching them anyhow?) so it would be nice if it didnt have the crossed out circles on them. Maybe in skinvue 7?

A quickie now that I have SkinVue working on my 64-bit render machine.

My first try with M4 in Vue. He seems to import fine.

Though i hate his lashes...

Just a WIP sorry for low quality etc, not meant to show of M4's body etc, Dauntless clothing from DAZ, and I altered the textures. Fire effect is a psd from Rendo marketplace with custom texture on sword, and my usual "Material madness" done to stuff, looks LOT better on high quality render (which is cooking at moment)

final scene requires the pose, will be vaslty different of course just sorting this character out for now, I do them liek that oen at a time to test and sort materials :)

By the way, that problem applies also with the hi-res M4 texture.  REALLY annoying. :/  But I will use the solution!  Thanks!

AK