Oh... may someone give me a hint on how to make those toecaps completely invisible. Maybe I am just too tired to find the right settings but under specific light situations I always get a shine or slight shadow where the toecaps are.

Quote -
Oh... may someone give me a hint on how to make those toecaps completely invisible. Maybe I am just too tired to find the right settings but under specific light situations I always get a shine or slight shadow where the toecaps are.

Make sure the specularity is set to 0 and also giving it a pure black color would probably eliminate it entirely.

Looking great on the textures, SaintFox!

Since the lip thing was brought up, anything I should do there? You want the extra polys back on the face? The entire lip UVs attached back to the face? Leave it all as-is?

Set the diffuse, specular and ambient value all to 0. Set both the transparency and transparency edge to 1. I think forgetting about transparency edge is probably the number 1 reason for invisible things not being invisible in Poser (leaving the specularity on being a close second).

personally, i don't see anything but disadvantages for a separate lip UV.  sure you could scale the lip map up for detail, but the idea of having different levels of detail for the lips and the rest of the face seems artistically bizarre.  i literally can't imagine the scenario.

but then, i also hate how the difference in body and face scale means that a really detailed face will show up right next to a completely unacceptable in raw renders neck and shoulder for most portraits. so maybe i'm odd.  on the other hand, i can completely imagine the scenario where that's totally acceptable for 99% of the audience.  i can't imagine the scenario where that's ok on the lips.  i mean, maybe it's just my totally faulty eyes, but i notice as a viewer the weird dissonance of completely detailed lips and kind of fuzzy mole in the previews of SaintFox's awesome textures.  it it were my own work, it would drive me nuts.

oh, and my suggestion is to save the invisible material once you've made it.  i find mine comes in handy a lot.

Wow I must give all you guys and gals who are developing Antonia Polygon an enormous round of applause. I downloaded"Antonia Full Preview 2009-08-15" from Odf's file locker last night and did a quickie Daz studio facial portrait render with Kozaboro's Mk3 hair....All I have to say is " Vic , honey , we need to talk, you see Ive found another girl and I'm going to have to trade you in for a younger model. Oh and btw she didnt even charge me for the gens."
 
You guys are awesome.. Ive read most of the 149 pages of this thread but didnt catch everything, is the UV map thats in this package the one to develope textures with?
Oh and wheres this developer site located at ? mabe theres some stuff I could use to morph around or photoshop up and make D/S settings and Mats for for D/S users.

@SaintFox,

With P6, and perhaps later versions, in addition to the things mentioned by MikeJ and odf, there is a setting in Render Settings > Preview > Transparency Display. The default is 90% transparent. You may need to set this to "Actual" or "Limit To 100%" to make the toecaps completely invisible in preview. Unfortunately there seems to be no way to override this user setting with a pz2 or cr2, it's purely an interface thing. In versions prior to P6 invisible materials will display as a cloud of dots, and there is nothing that can be done about it. All the above only applies to preview, and has no effect on the rendered image, which is taken care of by odf's advice.

Quote -
but then, i also hate how the difference in body and face scale means that a really detailed face will show up right next to a completely unacceptable in raw renders neck and shoulder for most portraits.

Just one of those things.
Since the whole idea behind good UV mapping is to try to eliminate distortion, programs that do it the way UVLayout do it create UVs that are proportional to the polygons they correspond to. In other words, if you don't alter the size any, a properly unwrapped head polygon will be the correct size, proportionallly, to a foot polygon.

In the case of human figures that means that if mapped together and left proportional, the head will take up a very small portion of the 0-1 UV space, maybe only 1/7th or 1/8th of the size of it. So, even using a 4K texture map, that limits you to 500-600 or so pixels for the head, and that's as  good as it gets. Use an 8K texture map, and it's somewhat better, but then you have 40 MB texture maps using half a gig of RAM to render.

So then also, your render shouldn't be larger than the textures that were used, or you get pixellation. In other words, with a head proportionally mapped to a body, even with an 8K texture map, you wouldn't be able to render a face shot any larger than about 1-1.5K.
By making the head (and other body parts) take up as much of the UV space as possible, you throw that proportion out of whack, but you also make much larger renders possible without risking pixellation.

So it's a trade-off. And that difference between scale doesn't have to be noticeable either, but it takes some work. Same goes for the lips.

I've already mentioned several times in this thread that the better way to UV map is to use multiple regions, where every important part can take up a whole UV square, or at least be very large, and Poser 5+ can handle it too, since the material room allows for setting tiling UV regions.
I would personally prefer it that way, but then you start getting numbers like 0-1, 0-minus1, 1-2, and so on, depending on which direction your regions go.
The problem, of course, with that is it could create problems for people who don't know how to deal with textures in that way.

So I did it in the traditional DAZ sort of way - overlapping and resizing.

But this is why I keep asking for feedback and opinions - to see if the texture people in this project want something different. Many things have already been changed, and I'm willing to make as many changes as needed until it's "just right".

Unfortunately though, there isn't a way to have it one way and many ways at the same time. Not until they invent QuantumPoser Pro 2050. ;-)

Quote -
You guys are awesome.. Ive read most of the 149 pages of this thread but didnt catch everything, is the UV map thats in this package the one to develope textures with?

That's the original mapping, not the one you've seen textures for over the past few pages.
If you'd like to have a shot texturing the latest version, site mail me and I'll hook you up with a link.
But be fore-warned, it might still be a WIP, and there might still be minor changes made to it.

I am sorry if you guys alerady paw with your hoofs while waiting on a reply about the lip-mapping - but even I have to sleep and eat sometimes and as we have a guest tomorrow there where other things to do as well.

First: Thank you for the tips on how to avoid the toecaps showing up or causing reflections or shadows. I will definitly look into the render settings and your tip, lesbentley, may save me from many other problems I have as well!!

About the lip mapping: I am completely happy with it as it gives a texturer the option to keep lots of detail and most of all it was far easier to tweak the lips to the given shape.

And in fact the mole is not fuzzy because the lips have a higher resolution as the face. The mole looks this way and I avoid altering the original photo resources as far as even possible. You have to tweak lips, brows and such to the mesh's shape and sometimes you have to alter hue, saturation and brightness because the light differs on some photos and you have no alternative shot. But off of these necessary tweaks it is always more convincing to stay with what you have on the photos as far as possible.

I am not allowed to post copies from the used resource here but I think that this little detail doesn't hurt anyone. Here's the original mole in it's original size:

SaintFox - ah, i see what you mean.  well, let me put it this way.  in the original, the detail and hardness of the area around the lips and the lips themselves looks uniform.  it  doesn't in the portrait.  and the transition doesn't look nearly as natural.  maybe that's not an issue of the lips being separate, but it seems like it would be?

MikeJ, i think maybe you're thinking too much about it from a developer perspective, and too little about actual rendering results. no matter what the mapping, from a user perspective (not a texture developer one)  there's only about 3 scenarios:

•  the difference in resolution doesn't matter because the extra resolution isn't needed for the render, and the uv mapping makes it all come out in the wash.  the scene wastes resources, but that's pretty common.   and the renderers for Poser 7 and up don't really care.
• the difference in resolution does matter, and is helpful because the areas that need more resolution are visually removed from those that don't, so that either the ones with a lower resolution take up less space in the render and don't need it or aren't very noticeable.  yay for variably sized maps.
• the difference in resolution creates a problem because it's needed uniformly and the textures were made with the difference in mind.  so the high detail portion has the detail it needs, but the lower detail portion doesn't.

as i mentioned before, i literally can't think of any situation where the second scenario might work for lips and their surrounding area.  if it makes it easier for SaintFox to create textures, that's really great. i think that's really important to support developers, especially for a non-DAZ figure. but i've had to spend a minimum of 2 hours postworking the neck and shoulders of just about every texture i've ever used, and i can totally understand why head and body might be handled that way.  conversely, i can think of literally zero situations in which it would be beneficial to have a visible difference in detail between lips and their surrounding area, and in no situation could the lips need detail their surrounding area didn't because they render right next to each other. 

unless she were an aardvark.  then it would be another situation altogether.

Quote -
as i mentioned before, i literally can't think of any situation where the second scenario might work for lips and their surrounding area.  if it makes it easier for SaintFox to create textures, that's really great. i think that's really important to support developers, especially for a non-DAZ figure. but i've had to spend a minimum of 2 hours postworking the neck and shoulders of just about every texture i've ever used, and i can totally understand why head and body might be handled that way.  conversely, i can think of literally zero situations in which it would be beneficial to have a visible difference in detail between lips and their surrounding area, and in no situation could the lips need detail their surrounding area didn't because they render right next to each other. 

I understand exactly what you're saying, and as I've said several times in this thread over the past month or so, I have mixed feelings about the lips.
My argument  for having them separate is that with a large texture you can get some serious detail in there along the lines of spec and bump. Now if you just use photos and paste them on in Photoshop, it might not be that big of a deal, but (also as I've said several times already), when I set out on this I wanted to create UVs that would be developer friendly but also 2D and 3D painting friendly. Think "one pixel brush" in Photoshop or Painter or Deep Paint 3D or BodyPaint 3D.

But I also agree with you too, and there are definite benefits to doing it your way as well.

However, the main difference is, problems with texturing the face and lips the way I have UVd them can be overcome more easily than problems created the other way around. In other words, you can shrink down your lip map and massage it in Photoshop to make the resolution match up, but the only way to get extreme detail into it is to have a lot of texture space. Once it's small it can't be enlarged without pixellation, but something too big can be made smaller, so the way I did it is the lesser of two evils, as I see it.

Without doing the math and just guessing, if the lips were part of the face UVs and sized proportionally, even if the face took up an entire 0-1 space, that would probably be around 10% of the available texture space, maybe less. So you would have to use an 8K map just to get a high res face close up, or else risk pixellation. Most Poser users aren't going to be interested in 8K maps. That would add huge amounts to a texture pack download, and would exceed the limit of a freebie hosted here.
So with even a 4K map, you're limited even further in render resolution in a close up.

But yeah, why should it matter to have extreme detail in the lips, while the immediately surrounding face doesn't benefit from that same resolution increase? Well for one it seems to me that in a lot of photos of real people there often does seem to be more detail in the lips - more noticeable features. Which becomes even more evident in fashion models where they may have lip gloss and such, while their faces are powdered into looking very smooth and un-detailed.
Then again, as I said before, it has to be one way or the other, and to me this way was the lesser of two evils.
And also of course, if the developers are happy, I'm happy. :-)

That is looking GREAT, Saint Fox!

stupid edit time limit

Eventually there will come a time when Olaf decides what's what with this project - whose UVs, whose textures, whose morphs, and so on. And by that point, all these little details will have been ironed out and the final this'n'that's settled. If the UVs I have made end up becoming part of the official, standard version, you can bet all these discussions will have been considered at great length, and any changes deemed necessary will have been done.

So far I've done all the changes SainFox has asked for, but I think she's the only one who has asked for specific changes, as far as the people I know of who are actively working on the textures. There have been more people outside of the project making suggestions than those within it. ;-)
But in the end, I'll be doing whatever I have to in order to make sure it conforms to Olaf's standards, so who knows what will change, or even if any of this I've done will even matter.
So right now I'm sticking up for the UVs as they are, simply because the main texture artist seems to like it all as-is.

yeah, i just got rid of a kind of long response.  in principle, i think you're coming at the issue backwards (it's not about short-changing the lips, it's about the face needing resolution just as much as the lips do), but it's moot.  i'm not making textures, so i don't think i should really get a vote.

The face has as much resolution/UV space as it can without distorting it. It takes up almost an entire 0-1 space, and obviously exceeding that space would result in unwanted tiling.

Edit:
But it's not about whether you get a vote or not. These sorts of discussions are good, so feel free to argue. As I said, you do have good points. :-)

Well... I still have both versions of the UV maps here so if ever you want to give it a try , even if only to find out what you like best - give me a holler!

Meanwhile I've textured many different figures with totally different uv mapping and material zones. And I found that there is not the one and only solution for mapping. Miki, for instance has not even a material zone for the lips - and this has it's benefits and it's problems. It is indeed very easy to melt the lips with the skin - while of course here as well you have to add the lips without lots of surrounding skin. Lips are very different from person to person, you always have to tweak (warp/contort) them to make them match to the mesh. So if you pick up too much surrounding skin you will distort the skin and get, for instance, weird pores. But then you can blend the lips with the surrounding face very smoothly. But this only seems to work for the pure, undone lips. As soon as you want lipstick you will have a sharper edge. Adding pure procedural gloss is impossible on a face without a seprate lip material. I always use a mask to create the gloss effect when I worked with Miki and likewise figures but I am not even sure how for instance DAZ Studio handles those masks. And of course even the blurriest mask will give a slight edgy effect under specific light situations.

On the other hand a seperate lip material offers more options for any kind of special effect. Painting the lips is easier - and especially with Antonia as the lip material contains some more space for surrounding skin. On the other hand: Yes, you have a different resolution. But as the lip skin is so completely different from the rest of the face with it's fine creases, the thin skin and the color, it is not as obvious as it seems. You may see from the parts of the photo-resource that the skin appears kind of blurry against the lips. And that' what I see as well when I look into the mirror - without makeup!

So I made just sugestions for small changes of the mapping as I and every other texturer has to be able to work with it. A figure lives and dies with the supporting add-ons you get. The Victoria-line is not so successful because it's more beautiful or "better" than other figures but because you can get whatever your heart desires to make her look like you want.

So it is a good idea to think like a developer as well after you took care about quality. Antonia will be available for free when she is finished - but I think that anyone involved in this project wants her not only to be downloaded but to be used as well.

And if people use her or not depends highly on supporting items like clothes, hair and textures, may they be free or commercial.
The easier it is for merchants and freestuff developers to create quality add-ons for a figure the more artists will use her.

As said, this is just my personal opinion and yes, of course I see things from the viewpoint of a merchant and freestuff creator.

SF, that texture is fantastic!
Now I need to work harder on mine...sigh. :)
Gotta see if Photoshop has anything for making specularity maps.

I have all copies of The UV maps made textures with  odf's and with Mike's latest set.
A little thing I sometimes do with maps that have the lips on the face, I use UV mapper and create a separate map.
That way I can do one set on the face map and extras with a separate map.

Personally, I would like to keep both sets of UV mapping.

*Personally, I would like to keep both sets of UV mapping.

I do not have enough insight into the process of UV mapping... may this be possible?!*
That's a big compliment!! But don't be afraid, people will like them all as people like to have variety!

About specular maps: Ours are painted in 3D like the tattoos and by hand with several photos as reference to see where a body has a stronger shimmer and where it is more dull. If you want to try it in a 2D application you can use a bump map as a start and alter the contrast so that you get some highlights. The important thing seems to be to not overdo it and to avoid these very sharp small highlights you get so a bit of blurring may be necessary. Otherwise you get this strange sparkle effect that you can see on some of the Elite-textures. This can look cool if you want to create a moist effect or a fairy/fantasy texture but as long as you are after a natural effect I think that this glimmer is pretty strange.

Here you can pick up a little plug in that gives you better control about the grayscaling:
http://www.thedigitalartshop.com/filters/free_plugin.html

Quote - We have everything complete now: Basic skin, specular maps, material system and the tattoos. So I will start to create the mat-poses now, add two light-settings or so and hopefully I can load up the whole set to the Developer's site during the weekend. Here's a preview on the tattoos you already know, combined with odf's asian morph (that I like a lot), refined with LaurieA's face morphs (very useful!!) and a little touch of dial-a-nipple

This looks awesome!

Quote - personally, i don't see anything but disadvantages for a separate lip UV.  sure you could scale the lip map up for detail, but the idea of having different levels of detail for the lips and the rest of the face seems artistically bizarre.  i literally can't imagine the scenario.

Would it be possible to change lip mats from one character (texture set) to another easier if the lips are uv-ed separately ? If so that would be a huge advantage in my mind. But I don't know much about this stuff.

As side note I think I have learned so much from this thread, about how poser works, character creation, there firefly fans hiding everywhere, etc. 

SF, I've seen greyscale maps used as specularity and notice a slight difference than bump maps.

But I also have to be careful on bump maps and adjust the contrast somewhat or I get glaring white ares in the actual texture when I apply them.

3D Paint makes specularity maps so I may use it again and see if it does the job.
Usually I don't make specularity maps but seeing how good it makes your work look, I gotta learn to do it right. :)

For UV mapping, I use the free UV Mapper but there is a better and pro version of it.
Makes UV maps easy to learn.

SaintFox: That texture looks fantastic. I'm glad you liked my silly little morph set. I guess I should probably include it in the next release then.

As for keeping both UV mappings, that's definitely what I'm aiming at. All we need is a user-friendly way to switch that's not too much of a pain to maintain. :laugh: But lesbentley's experiments with geometry switching could lead to a solution there, and if not, there are other options to look into.

Quote - there firefly fans hiding everywhere, etc.

bites into his apple

*I'm glad you liked my silly little morph set.

*Silly? Everytime I try to do the same with an eye-area I end up with an alien or a one-eyed Jack!

BlueEcho: If you like the way the texture looks here you do not have to worry about specular maps. This is the VSS version I've rendered. The specular maps Leo made are for a different material system, close to what we use for our characters in the marketplace. Both have their own benefits and so I thought that I include them as I did with the first version.*

Why don't you use the specular maps with VSS? I think it would make sense. If the existent VSS shaders don't support them, "someone" should probably start working on that. :laugh:

There is a place in the VSS skin shader for specular maps.

...and just for fun: Here's Antonia with the different material settings.

But here is an image of where it should have been.

{edited because idiot couldn't spell idiot}

I will definitly try this out - thank you heaps for the screenshot!!!

SaintFox, are you using the vss script or just plugging the textures into the figure? Not sure it matters. Those materials are really complicated, just wondering.

First I used the VSS script but the result was so far from what we have now that I tried to "adopt" the materials from the Template Skin material. I added all textures and the same slight ivory tone for the tint I use now - and again it didn't look as good as it looked before.

So I created a new node where the specular map should be (by referring to a simple prop with the template material) and attached it like the template showed me. The strange thing: The render looks perfect, everything works. Just the preview is completely silly!

Looking at the default Antonia vss nodes, I think you may fix you problem by pluging the texture into the diffuse channel not the color_pow node (but leave the one from the alt diffuse where it is). I 'd try it myself but I neither have the skins or mapped version you are using, so I am kinda guessing.

Quote - First I used the VSS script but the result was so far from what we have now that I tried to "adopt" the materials from the Template Skin material. I added all textures and the same slight ivory tone for the tint I use now - and again it didn't look as good as it looked before.

So I created a new node where the specular map should be (by referring to a simple prop with the template material) and attached it like the template showed me. The strange thing: The render looks perfect, everything works. Just the preview is completely silly!

I noticed that the default VSS Antonia is different than the all the VSS skin shaders I've used. 

Upps... the texture is plugged into the Color_Mul_8 by default and the lip's color texture is plugged into the Color_Math_10...

Unfortunatly changing it didn't help...

Edited because of crossposting - yes, the shader is different, and I think the result is worth keeping it!!

ok the colour diffuse channel should have no effect because it's value is zero, other than display the texture in the preview room, right? So if the texture not specular is plugged into the diffuse channel it should show in the poser preview. Could it just be one of those poser bugs, that restarting poser fixes?

I am a bit worried BB will come in any second and tell me how wrong I am, and in doing so help put my foot firmly in my mouth.

I thought the same thing and closed PoserPro, started Poser 8 and loaded the scene above - unfortunatly I have the same result here...

BUT!!! I've got you wrong about the diffuse! At the moment I saw this
the colour diffuse channel should have no effect because it's value is zero

I found that I've got you wrong. I plugged the color texture into the diffuse NODE while I should plug it into the diffuse channel - and yes, now everything looks perfect even in preview! I cannot thank you enough for your patience and help!

Does happy dance I helped somebody yeah!

Your textures look like they're going to be great, glad to help.

And as you where afraid that BB might see this - I HOPE that he does!
But this problem had it's benefits - I have a better insight in the vss-shader now. Noooo, I am far from halfway understanding it but until now I did not dare to alter it (except the adding my textures and altering the tint).

The texture will be available together with Antonia and so it will be yours sooner or later

Asian woman with tattoos. All I can say is drool, drool , drool!

@SaintFox,

Quote - (BluEcho) Personally, I would like to keep both sets of UV mapping.

(SaintFox) I do not have enough insight into the process of UV mapping... may this be possible?!

This is what all those individual obj file that you asked about earlier were for. My experiments show that it is possible! A differently UV mapped version of the geometry can be injected into the figure without having any affect on the morphs or other functionality of the figure.

I will post a summary of my findings, hopefully either today or tomorrow, but the short answer is that it all works fine, without any problems.

This sounds exciting - and like a novelty. It looks as if Antonia will not only be a new stand-alone figure but comes equipped with lots of "fresh air"!!

Arrgh!
I just noticed that the eyebrows are not right on my texture yet.

So I've been trying to correct them and only making it worse...sigh.
for some reason the material above the eyebrows shows a difference in shade than the forehead on the head tex.

I used a transmap to block any color except the eyebrows from showing, adjusted the setting several times and still getting a mess...sigh.