Many of the MATs I've acquired for M4 show seams.  Alexandre is the latest.

Anyone else have seams using this product's MATs?

The only time I really had serious seam problems was when I first started and wasn't using good enough quality settings for my min shading rate. But I haven't bought an M4 texture in a few months.

Tried turning off texture filtering?

The seams show up in the preview.  Turning off texture filtering helps, but the seams still show in places.

If all else fails, my M3 remap of Michael 4 will be available soon.  There should be a lot less seams to show then.
dph

I sometimes have seams show in preview that don't show in render, so I can't speak to the significance.

Hi :-)
Sorry to hear you have problem with Alexander's seams but never judge a product before you have rendered it :-) It can show seams in preview but they will disappear when rendered just as Believable3D write :-)

Lene

I second that.  I wouldn't be too concerned about the appearance of seams in preview.  It is just a minor annoyance.  As long as the final render doesn't show any defects, you should be fine.

I agree, visable seams in preview are a common occurence 99.99% they are just fine in the render.

Most times you just have to turn the render settings higher and they go away.

In my experience, a lot of figures/textures have horrible seams in preview.  These disappear when rendered.   If they don't, do as the other posters say and boost your render settings and turn off Texture Filtering.  I can't think why anyone would want to use Texture Filtering, anyhow.

If there's still a problem, contact the vendor.

While there are ways of fixing it, still, it shows a bit of sloppiness on the part of the texture creator.  Not that I'm naming names...I simply couldn't , because it's probably 99+% of them, would it freaking kill you to, when done, replace the background white with an average of the skin tone to reduce the odds of it happening in the first place, even with texture filtering?

I know, I know.  Another 30 seconds of so of work.  I'm simply brutally demanding.

If you combine a texture with a model that has an average of the textured skin tone as its color, the bit map texture will appear darker than it should.

Quote - While there are ways of fixing it, still, it shows a bit of sloppiness on the part of the texture creator.  Not that I'm naming names...I simply couldn't , because it's probably 99+% of them, would it freaking kill you to, when done, replace the background white with an average of the skin tone to reduce the odds of it happening in the first place, even with texture filtering?

I know, I know.  Another 30 seconds of so of work.  I'm simply brutally demanding.

Yep.  It will increase the file size.  Poser Pros had a requirement that all textures should have a plain white background.  Considering there is absolutely no benefit to be gained from killing the seams in Preview mode, I don't do it.

How is it that uniform color X will produce a different file size than uniform color Y?  o.O

Beats me.  Probably something to do with the way JPG compression and Zips handle colour info. 

Quote -
Yep.  It will increase the file size.  Poser Pros had a requirement that all textures should have a plain white background.  Considering there is absolutely no benefit to be gained from killing the seams in Preview mode, I don't do it.

I obviously have a backwards computer because it never shows up on preview: it's the render that shows seams.  Until I swear at myself and go back and turn of texture filtering manually.

Not that I don't take anyone's word for anything....

4000x4000 V4 limb map (I won't say who the seller was, but it's a pretty typical one).  I pulled the skin texture on to a new layer, recoloured the background, saved the jpg at highest quality in CS4.  I saved one with white, one with a skin tone background (picked by eyedropper from the texture).

With white background: jpg 4381kb, zip 3746kb
With skin tone: jpg 4392kb, zip, 3770kb

Barely significant difference.  Are people transporting these things on 5.25" floppies that 24kb is a deal breaker?

When I drop the jpg setting to 9 (out of 12), the flesh one actually comes in smaller.

Again, I have no idea of the why and wherefore.  I can only tell you what all vendors at PP were told.

I notice you mentioned Texture filtering.  Ya shouldn't use it anyhow.  Beats me why anyone would want to degrade the render quality in the first place. 

I suspect that if Photoshop is saving at 24 kb difference in size, that's just an accidental random variance in the saving process and could just as easily have gone the other way. Theoretically, there shouldn't be any different at all.

Quote - I obviously have a backwards computer because it never shows up on preview: it's the render that shows seams.  Until I swear at myself and go back and turn of texture filtering manually.

There is a script floating around out there that turns off texture filtering for all maps in the scene, it might have been listed in freebies here.

 If you're using Poser 8 the seams are because Poser 8 uses mipmaping in preview mode to save memory. The further zoomed out you are, the bigger the seams appear because of the mipmaping (reducing the size of the textures in preview mode by half concurrently the further zoomed out you are.) 

If a 4000 x 4000 texture that is 20 megs in size is loaded, when zoomed out to X distance it will be reduced by half proportionate to higher X values. So if X = X distance, then the textures will appear at half size (2000 x 2000) and only use 10 megs of RAM to be kept loaded instead of 20. If x = x * 2, then it will be quarter size (1,000 x 1,000) and only use 5 megs of RAM to be kept loaded.

Huh? Poser uses the texture size from the preview settings (preview texture resolution) (older versions used a small fixed size). Firefly uses mip maps for rendering, if you enable texture filtering.
If the lower resolution maps were created taking the mapping of the figure the map is applied to into account, it'd be a more useful feature. So the creator of the map has to take that into account and paint past the mapped parts of the map...

 From the smith micro website:

OpenGL Preview Improvements 
Real-time preview engine improvements in Poser 8 now display lights and their accumulated values more realistically, sorted by intensity. The light properties control allows the user to select each light they wish to illuminate the scene preview. Mip Map support has been enabled for enhanced performance when previewing large textures. Together, these real-time preview engine enhancements let the user view larger textures and offer more complete scene previewing when setting up lights.

Well, then Poser 8 uses mip mapping. Doesn't help you if your preview texture size is set low or you're using an older version.

And this isn't a new thing either.  P4 and ProPak 4.03 would do the same thing. Seams in the preview window and disappear when rendered.

If it's rendering fine, I don't really understand why it should be a problem.  If you want to test it do this:

Turn off texture filtering, set your render settings to a medium render setting , turn off raytracing, turn off shadows and hit render.  It will render fast and you'll be able to tell if there are any real seam issues or not.

I can see no fault in a texture if it renders fine and Poser's preview window decides to show seams.....

Texture filtering is a baaaaad thing.

 Yeah a general rule of thumb, preview window will not give exact results in anything but a pose. Especially Poser's preview window. As long as it looks fine in render, then it's okay. If seams still show up in render, then yes, that's a problem.

Yeah, can't trust that Pesky Poser Preview Window :)

Now let's all say that fast ten times LOL!!