A_

Just as an update, I think I can have the "one map" Antonia ready for download by tomorrow morning.
That will be a public thing, since it's not directly related to Antonia per se, but I'll also site mail you to let you know.

Yes, it saves a great deal of aggravation in ZB when everything is on the same map and not overlapping. I'm hoping ZB 4 will solve that issue. Deep Paint 3D has been able to deal with overlapping UVs since 2000, so I'm surprised they never 'fixed" ZB in that regard.

you are my hero! thanks.

and, yes, too bad they haven't fixed it yet.
i never tried working with Deep Paint 3D. maybe i should download the demo.

You're welcome. :-)
I don't even know if you can get Deep Paint 3D anymore. It's been a long time since I checked their site for updates, because they seem to have pretty much ignored DP since the last update three years ago.
Last I checked, you had to buy it bundled with Deep Exploration and Deep UV, for something like 500 dollars.

But it really is a great program strictly for 3D painting of textures and bump maps, though it doesn't do normals, displacement or sculpting at all.

There are no textures included in this set. Just use a Poser material in the material
room. I'll make a few free textures when I have a bit free time :)

The dress was modeled for the High Res Antonia figure. If you use it for the
Low Res figure, you need to scale it up a bit.

Have fun :)

wow, thanks.

that's very nice indeed.

Great to hear you like the dress :)

There are 2 versions with different polygon amount included.
The version with less polygons should work for simple standing
poses, the other version will give nicer, smoother folds.

Quote -
As for the eye sockets, that too would be up to Olaf. It certainly would be easy enough to assign a new material for the finished version, and wouldn't need any new UVs for that. Then again, anybody can do that easily enough in Poser with the grouping tool  too.

True. But if you made a character either for free or for sale that had, for instance, black eye sockets, to simulate eyeliner, you couldn't share that setting if you'd made the group only on your own obj. That's why I suggested it as part of the "official" obj. It wouldn't be hard to do, and the uvmapping would stay the same, but it would make some effects a lot easier. <also adding a gloss for something like V4's Tear Line.

@ odf,

Body handles off by default, yes please! I still think it would be a good idea to do this with a geomChan dial in the BODY. Still on the subject of handles, I notice that the handles in 114 deform when you move them. I think you you can strip out all the JPs from the handles without affecting the functionality (but would not swear to it).

@ karanta,

The dress looks great!
 

just to say-  iirc, geometry switching loads all the referenced objects at once.  that's why it's quicker (after loading) than, say, just replacing the figure with another from the library.  basically, it replaces the functionality of the library.  so i think you should think when you plan to use it you should think about how it would actually get used.  if something isn't switched often when developing a scene, such as UV mapping, it may not be worth the resources to load the obj(s) you won't use and deal with the general complexity and general bugginess i've seen in geometry switching products.  conversely, if it's something a person might switch frequently (such as hair styles, or styles of shoes), it might be worth it.  personally, i'd rather not have my system bogged down with stuff i'm not using, but that's me. 

@ cobaltdream,

Quote - iirc, geometry switching loads all the referenced objects at once.

I was wondering about that. Thanks for the clarification. For something like body handles, it probably does not matter, as the handle geom needs to be loaded any way, and the swapped file is just a blank obj, but swapping a whole figure geom just to change the UVs sounds like it would be too resource intensive.

On the other hand, I can't think of any reason why the entire figure should not be loaded as separate obj files. That would allow the geometry to be swapped via a pose file. Never tried that for a whole figure, but think it should work.

@karanta

Dress looks really nice.

Quote -

True. But if you made a character either for free or for sale that had, for instance, black eye sockets, to simulate eyeliner, you couldn't share that setting if you'd made the group only on your own obj. That's why I suggested it as part of the "official" obj. It wouldn't be hard to do, and the uvmapping would stay the same, but it would make some effects a lot easier. <also adding a gloss for something like V4's Tear Line.

Well then again, Antonia can be redistributed.
True you can't just go slinging different versions of Victoria around,  but you could make your own Antonia. Meaning you can create that eye socket material if you want, and when you save the figure out, Poser will create a cr2 for it, plus a new OBJ in the same folder. The new CR2 will refer to that new OBJ, and you can distribute the entire folder - CR2 and OBJ files, if you want to.
Just in case you weren't aware of all that. :-)

Note though that public versions of Antonia tossed out there need to credit Olaf and link to the Antonia site and cite the Creative Commons License.
I think. I'm still not really sure on what has to be included, but I'm sure Olaf can answer all that.

I will pick up the new UVs in a minute and that wonderful gown as soon as it's released. Please allow some days to look into the UVs - but regarding the previous version I am sure that they are a pleasure to work with!!!

Thanks, SaintFox, for the vote of confidence!
I'm looking forward to seeing what you can do with it. :-)

And don't worry about a new version appearing in another day or so. ;-)
That's not going to happen unless it becomes the "official" UV mapping and we decide certain changes need to be made.

I got the new UVs and presently working on the head texture.
so far all goes well and I hope it continures to do so.
I'll post an image later when I have enough done to show off. :)

Cool. :-)

I keep seeing occasional references to a "Creative Commons License". What is it, where do I find it?

 MikeJ - thanks. I did indeed not think of that.

In regards to geometry swapping, RoyG (not sure if he's active in the Poser community any more) once made his "Dial-a-tile" - it was back in Poser 4 before we had tiling materials, and what it did was exactly that. Load a plane with a lot of swappable geometries, each with their own mapping.So you could go from a 1x1 pattern to a 64x64 (can't remember exactly how high it went)  pattern, invisible for the user. Very convenient. The texture was just loaded once and became tiled when the geometry was swapped to another UV mapped version.

Now, this was back in Poser 4, and the plane wasn't all that memory intensive of course. But it was very easy to use and didn't feel like it bogged Poser down.

Creative Commons provides quick and easy to use licenses for people publishing online.  many mistakenly believe that they're only for items you want to share, but it's really for any type of license.  the thing is that you can use  an online tool to select the license you want, publish your work online with an image or text link to that license, and it says in plain English and in legalese what restrictions your work has.  it's a great way to simplify not only the process of applying a license to your work, but also presenting your restrictions to others in a way that make sense  and covers your butt legally.

ODF

Since I am still working with V2 in Poser 4 but have also used V3 with injections in P5 I will say here I would rather use .obj based morph additions then the the other more "Modern" method if Injection Morphs.
With the first i don't plug up my runtime with all those darn injections and can just archive my .OBJ morphs by body part in separate folders on another drive and add them as needed. For my way of working it is easier.

Also one thing I never got around to figuring out would say an Antonia with Injection Channels available though not filled or used be a bigger Cr2 file than one that has no available channels that allow adding those morphs via the old .obj method?

Karanta wrote:
"I just uploaded a free dyn. dress for Antonia. Should be soon available in * my freestuff*."

That looks amazing. Many thanks! Can't wait to try it out.

Antonia is such a nice and realistic figure :)
This will for sure not be my last freebie for her :)

cobaltdream: Thanks for explaining the Creative Commons - better than I could have, actually.

Also thanks for your thoughts on geometry switching. I have to agree. It does not seem very sensible to load two complete versions of the mesh every time when one would only very occasionally use the alternate one. I'd like to avoid dragging around a second cr2 with only two lines changed, but maybe it's not worth the prize. I think for the handles it might be a good option, though, because they don't have a lot of geometry to them.

Incidentally, you mentioned something about the general bugginess of geometry switching. Could you explain which bugs you've seen?

lesbentley: if we could load the mesh with the alternate UVs via a pose file, that would be fantastic.
I'd like to do as much as possible with pose files, because maintaining lots of alternate cr2s would be quite a pain, and not everyone can use Python scripts.

I'm adapting an existing texture to see how good I can handle the maps.
Added VSS and FS Toni lighting.

And I used 3Dreams Boy Cut hair for this one.

The more I work with the maps, the more I like them.

BTW:I've noticed a slight difference in the position of the eyes when using the  up-down, left-right morph.
I think separate morphs for each eye would be a big help.

The dress for Antonia is online now :)

Looking good, BlueEcho, and I'm really glad to hear you like working with the UVs!

Thanks much for the dress, karanta, it looks great and I'll definitely check that out. :-)

Looking at Blue Echo's texture up there reminds me of something I wanted to bring up a few times before but kept forgetting.
Is there anything that can be done about the eyebrows?
I'm not a fan of the idea of a mesh for eyebrows. It irritated the hell outta me when they did that for Victoria, and I went way out of my way to remove it. I mean, I didn't just make a morph, I learned how to edit it out of the OBJ file period. Seeya later, bye.

For one thing, Poser doesn't allow for making a material not cast shadows, and in close ups, an eyebrow trans map will cast shadows on the head. That, of course, just looks all wrong.
For another thing, considering it's still just a texture that's being used, I don't think there's anything to gain over texturing it directly onto the forehead, and as I mention above, at least one good reason not to have a separate mesh.

Now this is not a comment on what BlueEcho above has done, or anybody else, either. It's just the nature of the beast - the eyebrows look like even less of a part of the figure when mapped to a separate geometry floating above the forehead.

We all know that doing CG is finding ways to fake everything. Sometimes with textures, sometimes with geometry, but it's all still an illusion. IMO though, the eyebrows as a separate mesh used with a trans map is a bad fake, and eyebrows painted or applied directly to the forehead look far better. And of course won't ever give that weird shadow or floating-off-the-head effect.

Just wondering what everybody else thinks. :-)

I just want to stress that my eyebrow rant above in no way is a comment on BlueEcho's texture, or anybody else's, either.
I mean, they look about as good as could be, but the image just reminded me that I've been wanting to bring this up. :-)

BluEcho: That looks cute. If you want to move an eye individually, you can just select it and use xrotate for up-down and yrotate for left-right. But I tend to find it more useful to use the "point at" function with the eyes. Most of the time, I simply point them both at the camera I'm using.

karanta: Cool! Can't wait to play dress-up with Antonia.

Well, we can talk about removing the brows when I find a way to fix all the existing face morphs automatically. Until then, you'll have to make do with hiding them inside the head. I will include morphs to do that, and hide the toecaps inside the heels, with the next version.

I played with karanta's dress a bit. Quite lovely! Now all I need are some ladylike poses and maybe a couche or chaise longue she can recline on.

I prefer making the eyebrows right on the face map as well.
But I found that a lot of people wanted a face with no eyebrows so they could add them with a trans-map.

So I usually include the face with and without brows. :)

@ **odf,
**

Quote - lesbentley: if we could load the mesh with the alternate UVs via a pose file, that would be fantastic.

I'm away from home and Poser for a few days, so I can't do any experimenting, or provide practical examples. I have only dabbled with this, so there could be pitfalls I don't know about, but on the face of things it seems that geometry can be loaded actor by actor using the same syntax as is used in pp2 files.

This can be done in original cr2, or applied to a figure in Poser with a pz2. In the case where the original geom is loaded via a 'figureResFile' line, I suspect the original obj would remain in memory. If the original geom is loaded actor by actor the same as in a pp2, injecting new geom might overwrite the memory space, but this is only supposition, and I don't know how to check if that happens.

Either way injecting new geometry via a pose file seems to hold out the promise of swapping between differently UV mapped geometry without needing to carry anything extra in the default cr2. Whether the new geom, once swapped in, would necessarily constitute an extra memory burden seems to be an open question.

I have never succeeded in injecting a new geom via a figureResFile in a way that will survive a save and reload, and suspect that it can't be done, but I could be wrong.
 

*We all know that doing CG is finding ways to fake everything.

*Thanks!! Now I have the definite explanation on what Computer Graphics is as I am sometimes asked by people I meet!! *

*I will start with Antonia's texture tonight and as with the first one it will take me a while...

As for the poses I have a question and a suggestion. So far I did the poses I used for images with Puppet Master. I am an absolute beginner in setting up a new figure in this application but maybe someone is around here who is able to do it better?!

Off of this I found that especially on the fingers, toes, ankles and wrists the use of Puppet Master caused extreme rotations. This seems to be a glitch in Puppet Master but I was able to stop this behaviour by copying poses to an altered Antonia: I used "natural" values for the limits on the questionable parts and told Poser to use limits. And this brings me to the thing I wanted to ask since weeks: may it be necessary to alter the limits in the figure or ist it better to leave them as is? I think I always used Poser and Poses without limits  - but now found that there is indeed a reason for this feature being part of the application.

 While I'm no big fan of a separate mesh for the brows, I will say this: Eyebrows DO cast shadows. Granted they're not very big or visible, but of course they cast shadows. They're not painted on your skin IRL :)

Also having a separate mesh makes it wonderfully easy to change colours on them while still using the same texture. Yes, this can be done with masks as well, but apparently very few people knows how to use those. I'm not even sure I could do it without looking somewhere first myself.

Hiding the eyebrow mesh is easy. I can include that morph with no problems (or you can do it yourself, ODF :) )

Another thing is.. if the mesh for the head is changed, none of the existing face morphs will work any more. At least mine won't. And since I'm not too keen on making all 80-something morphs again... I'm all for keeping the eyebrow mesh ;)

if you like i can make a video tutorial on how i make the transmapped brows

You have to click on the image to enlarge it
 

Did you use depth-mapped shadows in your experiment? Not gonna work. They are too blurry.

Use ray-traced shadows.

Ah this is just low res :)  i used the p4 renderer in P7 to render it fast thats all :) i just wanted to see how it looked. But good tip though 

Here is Antonia without brow/lash shadows.

I usually make a trans map of the brows, that can be used and color applied in the Diffuse Color node.
This is what you call a "mask" isn't it?

BTW: The trans-map also will act as a bump map if you need it to.

When I make eyebrows right on the UV map, I make a matching trans map.
Just apply it as a transparency and the eyebrows on the face map will show without any annoying lines.

This way there is no need to remove the eyebrow mesh.

Yes, of course, Trekkie Girl, I'm aware that eyebrows cast shadows. I really didn't think that the physics of light stops at a certain size.
But one thing real eyebrows don't do is cast shadows as if they were hovering over the head like a patch of sod dropped from a building in the second before it hits the ground.

Just got a bit of bad news.
My baby grand daughter , Aryca, has H1N1.
She has been, sick off and on and her doctor said it was just a virus.

But day before yesterday she had to be taken to Children;s Hospital and they signed her in.
At first they thought it was whooping cough but flu dna testing was positive for H1N1,

Please say a prayer or send good thoughts her way.

But forget about my eyebrow rant. That's all it was, really, was a rant.
I personally think a better idea would be to create some sort of actual geometry, or maybe even use Poser's hair room. Can Poser even do that? Does it offer that kind of control?

But of course, if I don't like them I know full well how to morph them away, so don't worry about what I think about it. ;-)

Quote - Just got a bit of bad news.
My baby grand daughter , Aryca, has H1N1.
She has been, sick off and on and her doctor said it was just a virus.

But day before yesterday she had to be taken to Children;s Hospital and they signed her in.
At first they thought it was whooping cough but flu dna testing was positive for H1N1,

Please say a prayer or send good thoughts her way.

So sorry to hear that, Blue Echo! I was just watching on CNN about Swine Flu.
sending good thoughts her way :-)

Quote -
Thanks!! Now I have the definite explanation on what Computer Graphics is as I am sometimes asked by people I meet!! *

*I will start with Antonia's texture tonight and as with the first one it will take me a while...

Heh. Then again, it's a lot of fun trying to fake things!  :biggrin:

Looking forward to seeing what you do with your new texture!

Oh my, BlueEcho... I am sorry for you!! I very much hope that the people in hospital can help the little one. Please pass my best wishes to your family!