Quote - Here's my list:

. Stop reinventing the god drat UV wheel. V4 UVs have a bunch of textures and are supported by Genesis as well. Stick to those so that I can use all the textures I have carefully bought over a number of years. That's an incentive for me to use your figure right there. If you force me to start over with all new textures i'm probably not gonna bother with your figure at all.

 

Ok I agree with everything you stated except this part. And I think this needs to be cleared up by the community as a whole because it's a common request, and quite valid of course. While texture sharing would be awesome, it is best left up to a 3rd party script or utility that can convert V4 textures to another figure. If the figure uses anything proprietary from V4 - even a UV layout - it could risk facing legal issues from DAZ. Unless you have something in writing granting express permission to base your UVs on thier UVs then it is too much of a legal gray area for just about anyone, from the single starving artist to Smith-Mirco, to risk. UVs are just as proprietary as the model itself, or the textures and morphs that it comes with. It would be a lot like copying blue prints, and legally could be seen as no different than taking a portion of the geometry and using it in your own model. 

While the geometry is not the same, in order for the texture maps to be shared, the new model's UVs have to be laid out so that they line up as precisely as possible to the "donor" model's UVs, otherwise the textures won't line up and you'll have bad gapping in all your maps.

10 years ago it may not have been such a big deal, but today there are utilities that can convert 2D UV maps to 3D models, with varying degrees of accuracy. 

Add to that, when you lay out your UV maps in a way that is not natural to the model they correspond to, it is inevitable that you will get stretching where you don't want it. When you're using a program like ZBrush to do direct 3D painting, its really not a big deal because 3D painting will distort itself to lay properly on the 2D UV map, in order to look accurate on the 3D model, but most Poser texture artists are still using 2D software like Photoshop to paint textures, and will find it virtually impossible to fix areas of stretching in very obvious places. This will inevitably decrease the quality of original textures made for that model. The same will happen in any normal, displacement, bump, etc maps. UV's are intended to reflect the size and shape of every polygon on the model as accurately as possible in order to display texture properly. When you stretch them out of shape to fit another shape, you will get stretching. As it is there is going to be stretching anyway where the map is forced to lay flat while the model's geometry curves - especially along seam lines. So it's always your goal to minimize stretching and distortion as much as possible. Along with that, it is a hell of a lot more challenging than just laying out the model's UVs in their natural state - which can be challenging enough on its own. 

So in short, by asking a figure artist to make their model's UV maps backward-compatible with V4, you are essentially asking them to :

1 - Risk facing legal challenges from DAZ

2 - Diminish the quality of their work in order to force in someone else's work, (which also will not display properly on the model because they weren't designed for that model), just to save you money. 

That's not intended to sound rude or dickish, but that's really what you're requesting. 

It doesn't matter that it's been done with Judy and other figures in the past. That doesn't make it any less of a risk for the artist. It just means no one has cared enough to make a stink about it so far, and those who use those other figures have benefited from it.

Don't get me wrong tho, it is a great idea, and I was going to take that approach with the figures I've been working on. Imagine all the content that would be available for it at launch, making that many more potential customers, but DAZ's EULA is not specific enough to make me feel comfortable with it on pretty much any level. 

Even if DAZ did grant that permission, there's still the issue of diminishing the quality in order to force work designed for another model. 

I think a more reasonable request is to pick one style of UV and stick with it through all subsequent generations of that model, should there be any. It would still result in distortion if the geometry is very much different, but there would be no legal threat looming on the horizon because its all your own original work. 

Apologies for this being so long-winded but I thought I should try to explain why this is ultimately not a good idea, for those who might not understand why it's not being done with pretty much any commercially released figure. 

Hopefully some day Poser will incorporate tech that makes this less of an issue, but it will never correct stretching and distortion and will pretty much always make any new textures lower quality than they could be. 

 

~Shane