Does anyone know of a vendor/artist selling high resolution skin textures. I'm looking for V4 or G2F body textures in 150-300 dpi at 4000x4000 pixels, preferably with a bump and displacement map.

Mike 

have you looked at Daz.  /victoria-4-skin-maps-high-res

 Yep, I've got them. Thanks!

Here is some good reading :D  http://www.rideau-info.com/photos/mythdpi.html

Bill

 Thanks Bill

LOL!! I guess I'm a great example of the classic mistake. :) I now know what I really want. 

NIce article. I knew this already, but it was a good, full explanation. 

I chuckle at all the marketplace vendors who advertise their 2D products at 300 dpi. I guess, if they don't, people will keep asking, and it would be annoying to have to send everyone to that link. But if I were selling 2D products here, I'd convert them all to 1000 dpi, put that in my promos, and have people thinking, "Wow. These are such good quality."

Good link and something everyone with an interest in photography and computer generated art should read.  Having photography as a hobby for countless years, and having worked in a camera shop, I also liked the list of the main factors that determine image quality. Particularly the information 'The quality of the recording device (camera's optics and sensor, scanner's sensor).'  So there is a good reason to still own a camera even if you do own a smart phone.

I know I'm not helping, but I have to post.

According to wikipedia, the typical human skin surface area is roughly 16 to 21 square feet. If we were to scan all that at 300 DPI, how big would the image be?

Assuming your UV map has 0 wasted space and is square (of course this is impossible), the image dimension on one side would need to be 

SquareRootOf(16 to 21) * 12 * 300 = 14400 to 16500 pixels.

So with a perfect mapping, a uniform 300 DPI capture of an entire human skin requires from 208 megapixels to 272 megapixels.

Of course the UV map on V4 is not rectangular in UV space so there would, of necessity, be some waste. A rough estimate would put the resulting images around 500 megapixels.

The V4 skin map is divided up into three different images, so 500 MP / 3 gives around 166 MP per texture image. This requires each image is roughly 12922 pixels on a side. Let's call it 13K.

So - the original request for 300 DPI at 4K is a conflict. If you mean 300 DPI, then the required image size is 13K, not 4K.

Further calculating - how much memory do we need to use this texture?

Texture widths are rounded up to the nearest power of 2 in order to support mipmapping. (Many implementations round up both sides, but technically only one side needs to be rounded up.)

So the texture, in app, would be 16384 * 13000 pixels.

We have three of maps, so 16384 * 13000 * 3 pixels.

For each pixel, we need six bytes: three bytes for RGB, and three bytes for bump map (because Poser doesn't know a bump map is monochrome.)

So now we're at 16384 * 13000 * 3 * 6.

Mipmapping adds 33% more to that.

16384 * 13000 * 3 * 6 * 4/3 = 5.11 GB

 ROFL!!!!!!!!!!! OK, OK, I've learned. :):) Thanks BB, I actually appreciate the "schooling".

Quit learning, start dying!

 Mike 

in the meantime, the facial (head) map is not that far off. The head takes say 16"x16" to 4000x4000 pixel which makes 250dpi.

There is just no need for that level of detail for the rest of the body, in most cases.  The main issue though is that such a head should take at most 1/6th to 1/4th (*) of those pixels to the render result, so portrait shots which assign over 1000 pixels to the face require a larger map.

(*) on a render one can show only 1/2 to 1/3 of the full head texture, and maps should have at least double the pixel density of the resulting render.

BTW the Jurassic Park dino's did have about 4Gb on textures each. Hell of a job in the puters of those days. 

Good link and something everyone with an interest in photography and computer generated art should read.  Having photography as a hobby for countless years, and having worked in a camera shop, I also liked the list of the main factors that determine image quality. Particularly the information 'The quality of the recording device (camera's optics and sensor, scanner's sensor).'  So there is a good reason to still own a camera even if you do own a smart phone.

You can certainly take nice photos with a smart phone -- and there are apparently gadgets that allow you to attached zoom lenses (LOL!). But I'd never trade my Nikon for a point n shoot (which is all a phone cam can ever be). I bought the Nikon mainly for the 14 bit raw. 14 bits gives you a lot more leeway in exposure and color correction than the 8 bits that most PNSs offer. Newer DSLRs probably give more. Memory and data transfer speed is also an issue. How many 14 bit images can your camera capture per second when you're shooting fast moving subjects? I can easily fill a 64 GIG SD card in a single outing. And then there's the lenses. Nothing compares to some of the pristine sharpness and smooth bokas of higher end glass. As I'm sure you know, there's a reason a photographer will be ecstatic to find a great lens for only $900. :D (And people think Poser can be an expensive hobby!)