I'd be leary of doing V3 compatible mapping, you might have to ask DAZ's permission which might include objaction encoding the figure.

Quote - I'd be leary of doing V3 compatible mapping, you might have to ask DAZ's permission which might include objaction encoding the figure.

Hmm, valid point. DAZ might very well take the position that the UV layout for V3 is their intellectual property. I will not ask for anyones permission or get tangled up in license issues, which simply means that Antonia cannot be released with a V3 mapping.

If anyone wants to make one, however, they are obviously free and welcome to do so and release it separately, as far as I am concerned.

Thanks for pointing this out!

I don't think that a V4 mapping is against Daz license - or Dphoadley wouldn't be able to sell a V4 to V3 remapping ...
http://www.renderosity.com/mod/bcs/index.php?ViewProduct=59018&vendor=240894

Quote - I don't think that a V4 mapping is against Daz license - or Dphoadley wouldn't be able to sell a V4 to V3 remapping ...
http://www.renderosity.com/mod/bcs/index.php?ViewProduct=59018&vendor=240894

Well, I'd have to check the license and see for myself. But if there's any unclarity, I'd rather not risk it. Unless I get an explicit written statement from DAZ that they're okay with it, they might at any point in the future decide that Antonia hurts their sales and sue me for copyright infringement. So I think the simple and safe strategy will be to keep Antonia free of any references to proprietary content and leave such things entirely to third-party developers. That doesn't mean I wouldn't support dphoadley if he decided to make an Antonia to V3 mapping. Just that it won't be part of the official package.

I have more than a half dozen freebie and commercial figures by non-Daz developers that use the Unimesh texture layout - some sold here at Renderosity. That does not include the five DPH remaps that are available here at RMP and RMP Freestuff so there is a president of non-derivative figures that take Unimesh textures being commercial distributed without chalenge. I also have a number of figures independently re-mapped to DAZ Millenium 2 texture layouts. I think that although actual mesh can be copyrighted UV layout can not. I understand your position however, odf. I just am so tired of this alarmist attitude concerning supposed intelectual property issues... Daz has built its figures on borrowed inovations since 1999 and I along with 95% of PC users I am running an operating system boldly ripped from Apple. Companies like DAZ consider infringement not a moral or criminal matter but a calculation of cost benefit... if you read their EULA you will see they explicetly state that in purchasing any of their products you assume responsibility for any infringment on their part! I have never heard of any corporation honoring any intelectual property rights based on principal, only on calculation of likely liability. It is hard to establish real damages and substitution of product so unless the item is sold as an actual counterfit it is unlikely to be actionable... corporations simple use harassment suits and the threat of harassment suits in conection with eneforcable property claims and  EULAS. I hate to see the weight of the state brought to bare to protect specious intelectual property claims when the very same state will not persue my property claims in connection with someone kicking down my door on my private property and stealing my real property. Imagine if I left cash unattended on my front lawn or even the public sidewalk and then went to the authorities when that cash was taken from me! Why does this matter to me? Because if Picasso or Whorhol or Van Gogh or Gaugain (who painted from comercial post cards) were to come on the scene today they would have a bunch of volunteer thought police kicking their art up thier bottoms - no ofense to posters in this thread giving odf the heads up intended. I just feel strongly that intelectual property rights which were developed to encorage inovation and protect artists have been hijacked by private interests with a different agenda. When you are involved in the legal end of things you get a different perspective... they never say in the media that 99.5% of insurance fraud that is flogged in the media by insurers intent on tort reform is reported by these same companies as being fraud by insurers against consumers in their own internal and stockholder literature.

cobaltdream: Just two more things...

First, I think that your comparison with V4 isn't quite accurate. V4 has seams all over the place and was obviously mapped according to the 'simple is best' approach. I don't know if they didn't put any thinking in it or if they thought they'd support the fast and dirty approach of texturing by just smashing a flat texture on the front and back of every piece. Anyway, I'm trying hard here to find good positions for the seams, and it's a learning process. If Antonia has a few extra seams, that doesn't mean she'll necessarily share the fate of V4.

I don't have the experience, so I need to listen to people's criticism. I just don't respond well to "you're doing it wrong" or "you should do it the way our forefather have done for centuries". Because I'd rather try new things than sticking with the old. If it doesn't work out and in the end the old ways prove to be best, I'll give in. But not without a fight. :biggrin: If I get the thumbs down from a couple of experienced texture makers after they had a look at my UVs and actually tried to use them, I'll admit defeat.

Second, you're quite right. I am doing this mostly for myself. If I weren't, I'd have to charge. Also, you can't satisfy everyone. But that doesn't mean I won't listen or will not try to help make Antonia user-friendly. Basically, I'm trying to get to the point where I can let her out in the wild as soon as possible, so that people can start to create content for her or fix my mistakes if they feel so inclined.

momodot: I completely agree with you. I think it would be ridiculous if the UV layout could be copyrighted. But it would feel rather unpleasant to have the fate of a free figure depend on DAZ's good will. So I'll keep her "clean". Also, even if I don't go with the wacky layout I'm fiddling with at the moment and decide to reduce seams to the bare minimum, there's obviously still room for improvement over V3's. My preferred situation would be to give Antonia such kick-ass UVs that in the end people will create V3 and V4 to Antonia mappings. That's not very likely to happen, but a guy can dream, right? Anyway, I'll work with some texture makers as I said, and make her UVs as good as my meager talents allow.

V4 is hard to texture with the present mapping.
Getting rid of the legs seams is a nightmare!

V3 is not as hard to texture as V4.

I found Apollo to be the easiest to texture (unless you want to make a hair tex right on his UV map).

odf, I've looked your UV over and this last one seems more like Apollo's and would be easier than V4, IMHO. :)

Quote - momodot: I completely agree with you. I think it would be ridiculous if the UV layout could be copyrighted. But it would feel rather unpleasant to have the fate of a free figure depend on DAZ's good will. So I'll keep her "clean". Also, even if I don't go with the wacky layout I'm fiddling with at the moment and decide to reduce seams to the bare minimum, there's obviously still room for improvement over V3's. My preferred situation would be to give Antonia such kick-ass UVs that in the end people will create V3 and V4 to Antonia mappings. That's not very likely to happen, but a guy can dream, right? Anyway, I'll work with some texture makers as I said, and make her UVs as good as my meager talents allow.

Very sensible on your part to avoid headaches I think. You have maintained an real equinimity in entertaining peoples' opinions while sticking to your own vision/preferences, not easy in a forum like this.

Thanks, for letting my freak out screed go by without taking offense :)

I think your approach to the UVs is interesting and ambitious... I wish some people who had lots of experience with UVmapping figures would pipe in on this thread. I really am curious about the principals. I can't imagine how to balance the concern of seams and stretching/compression.

Quote - Don't bother making a separate material zone for lips. Any lipstick or gloss effect should be driven by a mask. When you assign the lips a different material and don't use a mask with soft anti-aliased edges, any lipstick effect looks fake. It's important to blend the lips with the face. So in my VSS shader, I design the face shader as one thing and I never put a different shader on the lips.

Personally, I'd prefer a material zone for the lips.  It provides the user with more options in case they are not using VSS.

it's not VSS that's the difference.  it's that no matter what you're using, you get a hard, unrealistic line.  fine for toons, not fine for anything else.  material zone edges don't blur, and i can't think of one situation where a hard edge around the lips would be realistic.  hard edges on other places, i could see working for second skins.  but in what situation would a hard edge at the lips be realistic?

I don't notice a hard line for Victoria and she has a separate lip material.

no, because most people don't use the separate lip material.  they generally have the same exact material for the face as for the lips.  you can have a different mat zone for each poly, and if they all take the same UV map, and you give them the same material, it's just a pain to manage.

the most i've seen it do is have a different specular and bump, due to lazy specular and bump map creation (take the diffuse map, greyscale it, take the greyscale, invert it to account for eyebrows, leave it right wise for lips).  but that's taking some chances in any case.

I think a different material zone for the lips can come in handy for full-figure renders or for background figures that don't need very detailed materials. I'll probably just have four or five different skin zones: head, body, lips, nipples and maybe genitals. For things like second skin textures, I think masks are better.

Thanks - I think it will be easier and provide more options if the figure is used in other programs as well as poser.

Re-lip material and sharp lip syndrome. I don't think a lip material has any impact on how sharp or smooth the transition is. It's those pesky pasted on lip textures with no blending that are the real culprit of the dreaded sharp lip syndrome phenomenon. However If Odf went with a completely seperated lips layout from before it may have been impossible to blend any texture.
I still think it will be difficult with the current chin/lip split mapping but not impossible.

Odf as you know I still prefer the chin/lip stitched but I think it's cool your trying something different than what may be considered standard by most.  Im certainly not opposed to experimentation and discovering new ideas otherwise innovation would not be possible but then again there's the old saying "If it ain't broke don't fix it". I just think the weaknesses ( possibly harder to texture seams in 2d painting apps, harder to apply complex shaders options with mask maps ). will out-weight the strengths ( less distortion ). Im not saying either way is better just what I think most may prefer. I think the V3 re-map is a great idea but I agree with you that you should do your own and leave V3 re-map to others.

I think you should try stitching the chin/lip and make a test map with a basic color fill with some noise to simulate a detailed skin and see if the stretching would be acceptable ( if you haven't already ). Also I have seen a technique ( never tried it ) on head models where you actually flatten/smooth out protrusions ( nose,lips etc.) on the mesh itself then start uvmapping from there. From what I could see it avoids distortion really well but it didn't look very easy to do or time friendly.

A few post back you mentioned moving verts. Blender's Uv mapping has this capability. You can even pin certain verts in place to get a better unwrap and it helps with symmetry and overlapping woes. Here are a few of the keys I use when adjusting UV's in the uv editing window.

Ctrl+Z=Undo
RightMouseButton=Select individial verts
Hold Shift+RightMouseButton to select more than one vert.
A=Deselect
B=Box select for selecting multiple verts.
B then B again=Brush select. You can scale the size of the brush with the mouse wheel. Right click to confirm. This one makes uv editing kind of fun...kind of ;)
P=Pin verts
G=Grab verts
S=Scale verts
using the X,Y or Z key right after G-grab or S-scale you can move them along a fixed axis for more precise control.

Select a vert and then go to Select>linked Uv's makes selecting seperate pieces ( Islands) easier.
UVs>Weld/Align>Align X or Y makes it easy to get a perfectly straight centerline to pin so that the object unwraps symmetrical.
Image>New>Click and type in the size then click UV Test grid to check  for distortion.
There are lots of other things but these are the ones I use the most. Ok now I'll quit harping on Blender so much lol. I actually think the best approach is to use multiple tools and take the best of the best ( or atleast the more hassle free tool ).
Hope it helps :)

Cheers
JB

JB123: Yeah, I'm learning Blender now. I bought a book and all. And I agree that it's probably necessary to switch between different tools. I'm a bit disappointed at that because while modeling, I could simply do everything in Wings.

If I end up making and UV mapping models on a regular basis, I'll probably buy UVLayout professional. After working with the demo for some time and then looking at the Blender tutorials, UV mapping in Blender looks really complicated and convoluted. But at the moment, I'm just not ready to spend that kind of money.

Okay, good news for the people who objected to the extra seams, I guess. I did some experiments with Blender's UV mapping features. The good news is that it's pretty good at avoiding those messy overlaps I got with UVLayout. The bad news - for me - is that although the maps are pretty good overall, there is now some visible distortion across seams, which forces me to go the traditional route and avoid seams in visible areas at all cost. So the extra seams in the face are definitely gone. I might still consider the ones at the breasts, but I'll probably ditch those, too.

I might try some further tricks with UVs later on, especially if I get a usable, not too expensive 3d painting program and find a way to hot-plug UVs within Poser. But the default UVs for Antonia will now most definitely be of the traditional kind.

Thanks for bearing with me so far.

Cheers,
O.

UV mapping is pretty dificult even with the best tools, but you look like you're well on your way. Keep up the good work.

Yeah, things stay interesting. Does anyone know a way to tell Blender to use the existing seams in a figure that's already been UV-mapped? Because picking seams is like a million times easier in UVLayout. I'm still going back and force about which program to use for the final layout, though. UVLayout seems to produce the overall best quality, but Blender is better at avoiding overlaps in tight regions such as the fingers and toes.

Still some other options to try, most notably Houdini. Also possibly C4D/Bodypaint, if they work for me under Wine despite my ATI card and have some free/cheap version that lets me make and save UV maps. And before I can get Antonia ready for release, I'll have to write a bunch of Python scripts to get all the data produced by various programs into a single .obj file that Poser can use. Or, hell, maybe even a big, bad obj-file-cleaner-upper Java application.

i've never had a problem with Blender interpreting existing UV maps.  you can select loops by holding down alt when you click (in case you didn't already know), and you can select edges in your UV map window.  i'm not yet sure how, if it's possible at all, to go from those edges to marking seams.  i'm not sure you can port seams without UV maps from one app to another. and if you can, i'm not sure you can with Blender.

Quote - i've never had a problem with Blender interpreting existing UV maps.  you can select loops by holding down alt when you click (in case you didn't already know), and you can select edges in your UV map window.  i'm not yet sure how, if it's possible at all, to go from those edges to marking seams.  i'm not sure you can port seams without UV maps from one app to another. and if you can, i'm not sure you can with Blender.

Yes, I can trace the existing seams within the UV editor by doing Alt-RMB repeatedly, then go back into the 3d view and Ctrl-E/'Mark Seams'. It's just very tedious, especially when you consider all those little extra bits like teeth, tongue, eyes, etc., and it would be nice to be able to tell Blender to just use the ones that already exist, but do a fresh unwrap. As a first approximation, if two faces share an edge in 3d space but not in UV space, that's a seam. It should be very easy to detect that in the .obj file, but I don't know how to pass the information to Blender, or else I could just modify the existing Wavefront import script.

I'm back to UVLayout for the moment. It's too bad that the demo version doesn't have the symmetry feature, which would be extremely useful. But although Blender's UV editing is quite impressive, expecially for open source software, the quality of the unwrapping isn't quite the same, and it doesn't have a symmetry feature either. With UVLayout I can get close if I'm careful, and maybe I'll just write some little application myself that'll do the symmetrizing.

Also, I'm back to trying wacko stuff with the positioning of the seams. I just can't help it, sorry. :biggrin: Image to follow when I've done the hands, as I'm currently remapping everything from scratch. But I promise to keep the face in one piece this time. Shrinking the nose in 3d space before mapping might actually help to distribute the distortion a bit more evenly. Maybe I can do something tricky with the lips, too, like mapping them with the mouth slightly open or something like that. Also, I had some trouble in the past with the nostrils and ear 'channels' - or whatever you native speakers may call them - which went in quite deep. Now I've flattened them, and hopefully that will make the UV optimizing go more smoothly.

You notice the free space around the hands. Those will be scaled up in the final version. Finger and toe nails will be separated and possibly scaled up some more.

Maybe the front of the neck could take the place of the back, over the collar. And this part ( back of the neck) could be attached with the back of the head on one piece?

I like the economy of this UVS it reminds me of V2 one

When resizing hands try to note somewhere the ratio of difference for the texture makers to know

Quote - Maybe the front of the neck could take the place of the back, over the collar. And this part ( back of the neck) could be attached with the back of the head on one piece?

That would be neat, but unfortunately, that doesn't work so well. See, the piece I fit in there is only about a third of the diameter of the neck. If I tried the same with the front of the neck, the seams would have to be at a bad position. Also, the transition between back and nape is much flatter than the corresponding front part. I'm not really happy with that cut off neck myself, but I guess every layout will have some weak points.

The seams between neck and head here coincide with the grouping boundaries, by the way. That's probably not terribly important, but it might come in handy at some point.

Quote - I like the economy of this UVS it reminds me of V2 one

Thanks! I'll go and check those out.

Quote - When resizing hands try to note somewhere the ratio of difference for the texture makers to know

Yep! I haven't forgotten that. Will use whole numbers for all the up-scaling across seams and document them for the texture makers. It's just that UVLayout, as far as I know, doesn't let you scale by numerical factors. So I'll do that step later in Wings.

oh yes, that face template looks much better than the previous one!
for texture creators it's easier to paint on it...

I cannot wait to see the final results!

Awesome job!

That looks really good... can the ball of the nose be 'pulled' and the distortion put more in the creases of the nostril wings? Having everything mapped so nice and on the vertical is great for poor old photoshop users like me. I don't even have a way of proofing textures in real time except with PropViewer.

The new face set up looks very nice and easy to texture or convert textures for her!

yes, from a texturer POV this looks friendlier. :)

Well, I'm glad that's resolved. I have to admit I like this version better, too.

momodot: Yep, I was going to try something like that. On problem with UVLayout is that when things are distorted beyond a certain point, its optimization algorithm just can't distinguish 'bad' from 'very bad' any more and sometimes messes things up badly. That happened at the tip of the nose, so I had to stretch things out a bit there anyway. I'll push those vertices around some more once I've fixed the eyes.

Quick question for the texture makers: when I close the eyes to eliminate texture stretching on the upper lids, should I keep the lacrimals where they are or cut them off to give them more room? I don't reckon there'd be a lot of texturing to do there, but I could be wrong.

I would do the lacrimals separately since they don't need to soft blend into the face I don't think... typically they have a different specular anyway.

Nice head layout.

your mapping looks great on the face, the ears, lips and eyelids.  it looks like it might be a bit of a problem at the nose, chin and under the chin.  but notice the big circle on the scalp?  it looks like it would be fine if you don't want to have any scalp textures.  i'm kind of ambivalent about them, myself, but if you wanted people to be able to make textures like Milan by Danae, it looks awfully hard.

cobaltdream: You mean this big circle? :biggrin:

You're probably right about the chin, though. I'll see if I can do something about that. It will be hard to avoid the seam under the chin altogether, but I'll try to push it down a little further and get rid of that convergence of lines at the chin.

Are you meaning to join the face to the head at the hairline? I would love a scalp based on a hairline...

I think cutting things along natural threasholds makes sense... should the under chin be on the neck texture rather than the face... the join could be hidden right under where the jaw bone meets the flesh under the jaw? I have always wondered about keeping the face separate like a mask with the edges at the hairline and jawline...

I was thinking about adding the under-chin part to the neck. It would probably fit quite well and make for better placed seams. I thought it was neat to have the seams at the group boundary between head and neck, but that's probably only useful in special circumstances.

Not quite sure about the hairline thing. Maybe I'll try to find some references and see how much I'd have to change the topology. I did go a bit further than the hairline with the face map because it will typically have higher resolution, and for bald heads or unusual hair styles it's probably not good to have those seams too low on the forehead.

no, i think you're right about the seam under the chin.  i think the placement is probably as little noticeable as it's going to get.  and i think you're probably close enough to the hairline.

i see what you mean about the moire being the display, not the thing itself, but i still think think the seam in the middle of the head is a PITA.  i've painted on skullcaps with no seam in the middle and ones with, and though i'm a rank beginner, i found the seam in the middle a real problem.  seams and hair or fur are generally problems. without knowing what you're doing and how you're applying the texture, i couldn't say if it's a problem that the stripes run sideways in the scalp, but if it the UV map goes up and down there but displays left to right, it's also going to be a PITA. or if to paint on it, you need to change direction from the top to the bottom of the head. 

again, not a big deal if her head's always covered.  i think it matters only if you personally like to use integrated hair as a base (which can be very useful, as skullcaps have drawbacks), or if you have a male planned and want to use the same mapping (cause more guy textures have stubble on the head).  but then, if you're going to use the same mapping on a male figure, body hair is a whole new issue.

I see what you mean about the seam in the middle of the head. I'll get rid of it.

just a comment to say that i realize the hairline is way high on the sides- i meant it seems right on the forehead.  most skullcaps under hair seem to be for that forehead region, so i focus on that.  and, cool!   

I am just gonna say this, please take no offense... what do you think of releasing the figure with a simple easy to texture UV while you continue to work on the optimized mapping? You have gone low poly in part to make the figure accessible... simple mapping such as for Posette or Victora 1/2 was easy for people with basic skills to texture and the distortions are not visible in most renders. I miss the old days when people could really push a figure like Posette, do wild things with it as opposed to the figures like V4 which are impossible for average users to even build characters for between the crazy .cr2 and the crazy mapping. I do full body work so I use most my textures at 1024x1024. I swear even in big renders it is hard to see the resolution difference between say Vicky 2 with a 2048 texture and Miki with 4000x4000 textures. Esp. now with render object smoothing.

Sometimes I wonder if I would have been more productive stuck back in 2000. People did radical morph work, crazy hacks, hybrids and all sorts of things... I have see really amazing figures based on those old P4 figures... I feel like the DAZ  bloat has really put a damper on DYI user creativity. I sometimes wonder if had the Azura hi-res variant of Eve/Posette gotten traction over the first Vicky Poserland would be a much more dynamic and sharing community today instead of the market base it is now. It is like cars that can't be tinkered with anymore because of the electronics as opposed to the VW bug that people could service, super charge and even mock up with a fiberglass body as a Porshe. My old Buik Riviara... that thing drove fine millage aside and it was all pins and cables... I could stand IN the hood to get at the engine.

Sorry... late at night and just thinking in print.

momodot: Don't worry, I'm not planning to spend ages until I find the perfect mapping, even if there were such a thing. But now that I've come this far, I think I'd rather finish what I have instead of examining all possible paths. As I said, I welcome alternative mappings, and I'm happy to provide them myself over time once I get a better idea of what people might be looking for. I mentioned the idea I had about hot-plugging UVs. Even if that's not entirely practical, it should be fairly easy to distrbute re-mapped version of Antonia, either directly via a .cr2 and associated .obj, or via a script that would generate those for the user.

I haven't really followed up on what's been going on in Poserland, and I'm not intimately familiar with the DAZ figures. What is that 'DAZ bloat' you are talking of and how does it prevent people from being creative with the figures?

The early Poser figures and the early DAZ figures were easy to use because of the low polycount and they were easy to morph because of low poly count. Yes you need resolution to do morphs but I have noticed that very dense meshes don't morph well. The DAZ bloat is the inflation of resolution for purely marketting concerns, bigger is better. I can't really use most of the new figures I have aside from nude and maybe with hair even though I just bought a new and for me very expensive computer... with DAZ the bloat has extended to crazy .cr2 that have arcain injection systems, complicated JCM morphs and but loads of JCM magnets that make the .cr2 very breakable, unreliable to save, and very hard for amatures to work with. I use a V4 at les then a quarter resolution and with the magnets painfully removed and yet it is essential indistiguishable in renders from the huge default figure. EF created figure with enough mesh in the eyeballs alone to be morphed into a little Posette and yet the figures can't be full body morphed without looking terrible and forget trying to scale any body parts. I think the Millenium 3 figures by DAZ have very good mesh flow, very robust for deforming and scaling but I use mainly the Reduced Resolution figures because it is the mesh flow not the mesh density that makes Millenium 3 so robust. The bloat mentality has lead not only to dense mesh that gives no render advatage, I seldom see renders over 2048 pixels to the long side but more likely than not each figure in the average render has half a dozen 4000x4000 textures when one well laid out 2048x2048 would certainly suffice,,, is there a reason to have each body part mapped to a texture twice the final render size? Back with Posette if you needed detail work you could just take out a group/material like a face or head and blow it up on its own map. The so-called big head or big hand maps.

Excess resolution forces people to work with very simple scenes or resort to render paces and compositing, complex mapping makes it impossible for typical Photoshop users to create textures, and overly complex .cr2 prevent normal users from distributing morphs or hacking figures. It is easier to add erc magnets or subdivide a mesh let's say then to strip a complicated .cr2 or down sample a mesh. Poser made most of its innovation from users hacking simple .cr2s and .pz2s but then those inovations get appropriated by DAZ and burried in code that prevents users from fiddling with them. The thing I loved about Poser was the fact that all the content was in coherent text files that could be edited in notepad.

In 1992 I had an IBM XP running DOS with a 350kb UI called WinDOS... I am now running Vista which requires a Gb of RAM overhead... as a user I see no advantage. In the mid 1990s I had MAC software all under 500kb that had all the functionality of my current nearly 100MB photo editing, painting, database and wordprocessor applications but were much more stable and often faster. The bloat keeps me upgrading and renders my favorite applications and accessories obsolete and incompatable but it doesn't improve my productivity in the least. It serves the companies I buy from, not me the user.

As for the community, it used to be a DYI community of sharing and innovation but now it has become a market place. Even still though, most of the truly radical inovation is done by people who to some degree give it away, Face_Off tells how to do the set ups that he selss scripts to do, ockham, svdl, bagginsbill give their work away. but back in the time of Morphworld and Kozoburo there were litterally dozens, maybe a hundred skilled inovators sharing their work as hobiest rather than thousands selling dial spin and Merchant Resource texture "characters". No, one one has a moral obligation to give their work away but people sure had fun back when stuff went out not even with liscence agreements or EULAS. People worked for fame and the satisfaction of becoming a virtuoso... now every newbie is a merchant wanabee and I can tell you... given my stats in the high upper end of sales, few people make money in this game, unless you live in Eastern Europe or Africa Poser is not an economical way to generate income... a few hours work as a graphic artist can earn ten times what months of work developing Poser content can generate. In a way the fiction of making a full time living as a Poser merchant fuels the whole Poser economy.

Sorry for typos... I'm typing in the dark.

Another thing...

I don't understand the high mesh count bodies... in most case figures wear clothes, would it make sense to economize on figures body and use the resources on hi mesh high resolution textured clothes? I am amazed by dense mesh in the eyes, inner mouth and back of the head on some figures... In the beginning the nude body mesh density mattered because Poser was oriented to the artist drawing and painting conventionally. People post-worked in the hair and clothes as needed but now the emphasis is on hi-res complicated costume and hair... why not make figures with resolution just in the hands and face and sell separate "nude" figures with high resolution bodies... body sculpting can be done with texture and displacement anyhow but clothes and scenes really need mesh detail.

The problem with early figures was the sculpting not the mesh resolution... you can take a Posette mesh and bodybag it to the V4 or Miki body shape and JPs and it looks as good or better than V4 or Miki... what was needed was beter sculpting and better JPs not dense mesh and crazy magnet fixes. I think nearly all JCM and ERC magnets can be replaced with simple low overhead body handles... in other apps people use body handles even for facial expressions... how many morphs can a simple no geometry body handle can replace on the breasts or buttocks.

Realy Poser has been hurt by the terrible magnet interface... imagine a single actor mirrored "sphere of influence" deformer tool... could be used for modeling, expressions, bend fixes etc. but the three part default number magnets are a nightmare for most people to work with.

And I honestly believe V4 and M4 were written and mapped the way they were to keep people 'out from under the hood'.