Quote - This is a great conversation, however everyone is talking about greating displacement and normal maps like it's part of their pipeline, and I suspect they have never actually done it.  As someone who has been actually rendering Poser figures with displacement and normal maps, and subd'ing, in my experience...

Creating displacement and normal maps for Poser figures in ZBrush is incredibly difficult - because the material zone of the figures skin are split.  You need to remap the figure to get anything of a high quality.  How many full body displacement mapped figures are on the market?  0?  Why is that?  Because even if you get around the multiple UV zones, the Poser joint deformation system will kill your displacement map.  The amazing graphics coming out of games is happening because they have one material map for the figure - not 5 or 6.  [Caveat....maybe the new Poser Pro 2014 skinning system kixed the joint deformation problems with displacement maps - I don't know].

I've been trying a new workflow in PP2014.....GoZ a posed Roxie figure, subd in ZB 3 times, add all the detail, generate a normal map, GoZ the level 0 subd back to the Poser, and apply the normal map to the materials.  But of course this utterly fails, because the eye UV's overlay the skin UV's, so ZB adds some normal mapping info for the eyes on the skin map.  The multiple material zones is killing realism renders in Poser :-(  So I have re-UV'ed Roxie, created one material zone for "skin", and the above works.  But it requires pythons skills and a lot of effort, and I doubt anyone else could be bothered.  And the end result?  You can still see polygon edges on the figures shoulder. 

12 months back there was a post here about what features the next gen figures should have, and everyone said - non-overlaying UV's and one material zone for skin.

One skin material.  Non-overlapping UVs.  More polys.  That's what we need.

http://www.renderosity.com/mod/gallery/index.php?image_id=2451124 - subd'd TWICE and I stll don't think it has enough polys for the detail I'm after.

Paul

If I'm putting displacement maps on my own meshes that I can make non-overlaying UV's for and one material zone for skin for.

Then what's your thoughts about having a displacement map in Poser Pro 14 ?

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