Thanks for the time you took to put together all that info Teyon.

My original comment was not meant to be dissatisfaction with the pre-P10 models (I haven't tried the P10 models yet) - someone said high poly models were not needed, which I disagreed with.  For my purposes, I need very high poly meshes to get the look I'm after (I have a life-drawing background, so love to get all the details in).  For many years I tried to develop a ZB workflow to do this, but the Poser model texturemap splitting, plus some ZB shortcomings meant I could never get the workflow to actually work.  The closest I've got is spliting the V4 skin texturemaps into quadrants and merging all the skin materials into one (so all skin referenced one set of UV's, including the head).  But even that is not without it's issues - if you need to change the pose you had to start again. 

With low poly models, if you've got a large polygon running the wrong direction to a seam you are trying to add, you are stuffed!  The only way out is a) subd that area - then you loose your UV zones, or b) subd the whole mesh, so you are adding 100's of thousands of polys to the model just to add one seam.  I guess c) could be use displacement maps, but I have yet to see displacement mapping work convincingly on a Poser model, because of the join areas.  d) could be convert the figure to a prop, then do a displacement map, but then because of all the multiple UV zones for skin, you have many more problems.

So in summary, the quest to build low-poly models makes it impossible to get renders with the details I am after.

Also if you find that you've lost your groups - either through export/import or due to subdivision quirks in whatever app you're using - you can get them back by loading your morphed figure into UVMapper (I think this is in both Pro and basic) and then choosing Import UV's from the UVMapper file menu.  Select the original unmorphed base as the file to be imported. This will overwrite the groups in your morphed figure. Then just save it out under a new name. Easy. :)

You cannot do that if you have subd'd the mesh in ZB.

Paul

Creator of PoserPhysics
Creator of OctaneRender for Poser
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