Constructive critique is always apreciated and I'll try my best to alter what can be altered and to answer to the other questions.

First about the specular map: In fact I combined it with the VSS and it works well. The specular map is not a "fake highlight" - it picks up the parts where a body has more shine. Look into the mirror (well, in fact we talk about women here, so please imagine yourself less hairy ) - but not directly after you took a shower or treated your skin with a body lotion, give the skin at least 6-8 hours to recreate it's natural lipids. You will find that some parts of the body are more dry (side of the thighs, cheeks...) and dull and some are smoother and have some shine (shins, nose, forehead). The VSS shader, used as is, gives the same overall shine to the body. You, odf, gave me the idea to combine the specular map with the VSS to have a slight vary in the skin's shine. And it works. In other words: In the material room you'll find the specular map more on the right side, GeneralNutts and I spent a whole night to weave it into Antonia's shader :laugh:

In view of this wonderfully generous gift you have given us, I hope I do not seem too ungracious if I make a few suggestions as to how I feel that it might be improved.*

As said: No problem!

I agree with odf that some of the genital area looks a bit dark, and this is accentuated if the "Labia_Detailed" morph is used, because this morph seems to compress polygons around the edge of the genital cleft.*
I am unsure about them as well. Unfortunatly, I think I said it before, I am not allowed to post the photoresource here because of copyright reasons. And THESE photos that I used for the genitalia I can not post because I will be banned immediatly as well.
But I can tell you that they are not color shifted, the woman on the photos has such dark outer and inner labia, they are almost purple (and this is, as I have seen meanwhile from dozens of photo sets, the average color beside dark brown - for caucasian women).
But - and this is an important but! - we are not about to distribute the truth but an illusion. And an illusion is what people think about how a body looks (or should look following their taste) and not how it looks in reality. Most Poser characters are far, far to evenly tanned to look realistic. But I see that I should brighten up this area a bit and shift the color more to match the thighs.

I also feel that the teeth may be a little too light.
I am amazed!! I left the teeth exactly as is (but can tell you that all teeth are made from the four upper and lower front teeth as the molars are not visible on the photos) and thought that people will find them too dark!! I can darken them with ease but prefer to offer a second set that is darker for those who prefer it.

In preview a few white seams are visible

There is just one workaround for this and this is filling the white part of the texture with a skin tone. Pretty useless as it only makes the textures' filesize bigger. I know that some merchants do it because their are always customers who say: I have seams in the preview... but on the other hand people will complain about larger filesizes.
By the way: I see no seams in the preview as all textures are slightly larger as the UV-map. So this seems to depend on your settings. Do youu use OpenGL or Sree3D? And may this be a problem of your version of Poser? I know that it was something people complained about when using Poser 6...
Okay, I just opened up PoserPro, 8, 7, 6 (one after the other of course), loaded and textured Antonia and oh my... I am spoiled, I almost forgot what a super-crappy preview mode P6 has. I will post some screenshots later, just FYI (and maybe, if you often use the preview mode, you want to get P7 sooner or later - or better get Pro!!).

After applying the "!Clasic ! FullTex" file, the brows material is still fully visible
I did this willingly as a full transparency never does what a "Brows gone" morph can do. But it is no problem to add something like the "Toecaps gone" matpose. As soon as I have reworked the genitals I will add one.

I am wondering if there is something about the new UV map that is making it hard to map a texture into them?
Yes, that's the UV-map, we are already experimenting with a different sclera mapping. And to comfort the other texturers here: It will ONLY be the sclera, everything else should be possible to keep.

* I'm also wondering if a transmap to fade the iris gradually into the pupil would be a good idea.*
The bulge is a mesh-thing, yes. As I added a "blend" between iris and sclera it may be more obvious. But this blending area avoids the look as if the iris is a seperate prop, stuffed into the sclera (a problem known for instance with the Sydney figure). The Iris-blend is something I will try out, I do not like the fact that every 3d-human's iris is a round hole as well where in fact the iris looks more like a rosette.

The last point I want to make with the eyes is the lacrimals, these seem to be more or less the same colour as the surrounding skin

The lacrimals are part of the head, if you open the head texture you can clearly see them in the inner edge of the eyesocket. The "almost skin" effect may be caused by a combination of light and shader. In fact I made them from a close shot of the eye by cutting out the lacrimal section and tweaking it to the given form. But of course the area of the lacrimal is very, very tiny and this leads to a kind of "pixel purree" after tweaking and resizing.

So, as said: First thing is the genital section - I will idealize it a bit. Then I make a second set of teeth, with a whiff of more saturation and maybe darkness. The sclera thing is the third project and I will experiment with a pupil-transparency but I am not sure if this works.

I'm not always right, but my mistakes are more interesting!

And I am not strange, I am Limited Edition!

Are you ready for Antonia? Get her textures here:



The Home Of The Living Dolls