how can i get the wet look on a character? i have played for hours with the settings and materials. and when i render the character, either it doesn't show up, or the entire skin has been changed. All i want to do is add the reflection of the wet look. Not change the entire color or texture.

Simple.....Put your monitor in the shower and render away ;-) ScottA The serious answer is make a seperate UVmap. And use that one as the reflection map. You'll have to paint on it (probably in black and white) to get the shinnyness in the areas you want them. Most people use a paint program after the figure has been rendered. But that's cheating ;-)

okay, dumb moment. how do u make the uv map? i am new to this program, and am still figuring things out as i go. but this,ha. over my head and through the woods...

Attached Link: http://www.uvmapper.com

Download this free program. Then look at the tutorial he has on his site. It's really easy once you go through it a couple of times. If you don't know what a UVmap is: In basic terms, it's like gift wrapping paper for a present. It allows you to wrap a texture around a 3Dmodel, and when you paint on that texture in any basic paint program and apply it to the model in Poser. You get a detailed, colored 3D object. ScottA

The figures that come with Poser already have UV maps, so MindsEyes doesn't have to make one of those. The UV map is, essentially, the instructions that tell Poser how to wrap a particular "sheet of paper" around the figure. There are several different kinds of "paper" that can be wrapped around each figure. Unfortunatly, these "sheets of paper" are also called "maps". In poser, the "maps" come in 4 flavours. The one you want is the "reflection map". "texture map" is the picture of what's on the surface of the figure. It's where you color the skin, draw the bikini lines and the freckles, etc. That's the kind of "map" that you see most often, in the Poser Store, in "Free Stuff", etc. "bump map" is really the "texture". As the name implies, it lets you make the surface bumpy, ridged, etc. On the bump map, you can add cords to muscles, buldging veins, dimples, etc. "reflection map" makes the durface shiny or dull. When you paint a "reflection map", you can paint wetness on different areas of the figure. "transparency map" makes parts of the figure partially or totally transparent. It's often used on hair, which sort of looks transparent in real life. Or on the corneas of the eyes. The maps are simply bitmapped images, and you can paint them with any painy program, Paintbrush, PhotoShop, etc.

can i extract the reflections maps from the program? or should i just take a nude character, save as jpeg and bring it into a paint program, and paint it in there, then use that image as the reflection map in poser? honestly, all this confuses me. but once i catch on, everything goes well. sorry to be a pain in the arse...

I think you are confusing a render with a texture. The reflection map is just a texture that's applied to the reflection channel in the materials window. If you open the P4Woman then go to Render->Materials-> then select "skin" from the list of materials. You'll see a texture named " p4 woman texture.tif" in the texture section. And a slider under it to control how visible it will show up......this is the color channel texture. And you can also apply that to the reflection channel if you like also. If you have Poser4. There are UVmap templates for the Poser figures on the content CD that haven't been painted on yet. Open one of them in a paint program to see what they look like. They look like the black&white pictures you would see in a childrens coloring book. Compare those black&white textures with the painted ones that Poser installs in the Poser--Runtime->Textures folder. They are exactly the same except for the paint colors. A 3dmodel does not have the ability to allow someone to simply wrap a texture around it unless it's UVcoordinates have been established first. The computer needs them so it knows how to attach the texture to the model. ScottA