Say I have V4 standing under a colored spot light with an image attached to the light's material diffuse node, see below. Is there any way to burn the effect into a new original skin for V4?

Blend the image with a V4 texture in an image editor... it's not going to behave like a projection though.

Poser doesn't provide a texture baking function. Blender might but I don't know how it handles the multiple overlapping UV maps that V4 uses.

Actually, it worked pretty well, except at the seams (if I knew how to do uv mapping, I wouldn't be asking the question in the first place). Thanks for helping. I overlayed the pattern onto the original V4 maps for the figure in Photoshop and combined the layers with a little masking for the eyelids, brows and mouth and combined layers using the hard light setting. Sample on left with a green light on the figure, sample on right with a white light.

Blender can do texture painting, so loading V4 and these textures in Blender should allow you to clear up the seams, and save out the corected textures.

...there is a way to bake textures by using a one sided square, orthogonal camera, and probably a lot of fiddling. I recall both bagginsbill and PhilC mentioning a method to bake procedurals, never experimented with it though.

As already mentioned, poly painting the image onto the V4 mesh within an app with those capabilities would be a way to circumvent seams... most decent 3d suites provide some form of poly painting these days.

The problem with using a 3D paint application is that it doesn't yield the same effect as texture baking. For instance, let's say you want to put some fake AO into a texture. With texture baking, it's a snap: Just render a procedural AO shader and bake the results into a texture map - Done.

By hand, depending on how you've laid out the UV, you have to paint those Ao shadows by hand and they're not likely to be as accurate and certainly won't be as easy to generate.

Texture baking is something that would be excellent to have from within Poser. It would be a real game-changer and Material Room scripts and such would take off in a big way. But, it would also heavily impact the third-party re-texture market, since one could create a wide variety of custom texture packs relatively easily with a little bit of node knowledge. (Wouldn't take care of all concerns, however, but would go pretty far.)

PS - One can do texture baking from within Blender, which is free, and the process doesn't look too difficult for simple textures or something like AO and the like.

Unfortunately I'm a real dunce when it comes to making 3d models or textures. I will try doing it the Blender way though I only tried Blender a little a couple of years ago and never could do much. So I just load V4 figure with the maps I made and then paint a little here and there at the seam areas to cover over the misalignments? And then do I save the whole figure or just the mats? Is there a cloning brush in Blender like in Photoshop?

Sorry, how do I get the V4 figure with maps into Blender? I tried exporting it as an obj but no materials came with it.

Don't have a clue about how to get V4 into Blender for painting, I don't use Blender. You'll probably have to reapply any image maps, in elaboration also not sure how Blender deals with .mtl files if applicable, and your import method (from Geometries?). A lot of unknowns...

Maybe forum member vilters can help, although he seems to have an allergic reaction to V4 and her UVs layout. Still...

Found this_

http://sickleyield.deviantart.com/journal/Tutorial-Seamless-Texture-Painting-In-Blender-439338827

Looks like it's coming from a DS perspective but maybe something useful for starters?

Ok, thanks Primorge. Blender has so many parts it's kinda overwhelming just to try to step in and do something without fuss.

Have to admit I would have just painted the whole texture from scratch in Photoshop, skipped the light projection in poser, and just cloned/blended/painted using a template/seam guide to fix texture seams.  http://www.snowsultan.com/seams/v4_seamguides.zip

Just woolgathering but, there may be a way to get similar results with a purely procedural method in the advanced tab that skips the texture seam difficulties altogether... would probably involve a little control masking, marble or clouds scaled appropriately, etc.

Not sure what happened to the seam guide link above but, SnowSultan's V4 seam guide...

http://www.snowsultan.com/3.html

Summation;

Looks like your options are...

Learn how to texture paint using Blender or

learn the tricks involved with painting seams in photoshop and prepare for a lot of test renders or

bagginsbill comes along and solves the problem in 5 minutes in the mat room.

Sorry, how do I get the V4 figure with maps into Blender? I tried exporting it as an obj but no materials came with it.

You'll have to apply everything using Blender's material commands, which I don't know. Unless there's a script that converts them, which I doubt, Blender isn't going to accept Poser's native material nodes. So, you'll have to learn how to use Blender's materials to make the effects you want to bake, essentially baking Blender's materials into texture maps instead of Poser's. I only mentioned Blender because it's free and it can bake materials, but only it's own. However, Carrara also can bake materials and it will accept some of Poser's native material nodes, IIRC. But, also IIRC, the scripts you need to use to back materials or fully import Poser materials are extra and are not free. (I haven't used Carrara in a very long time, so I wouldn't be aware of the capabilities of new versions of it. It might be able to do that sort of stuff as it is, out of the box, without the purchase of addition software for Poser integration/baking.)

Elaborating on Morkonan's comment, Cararra also has ok painting capabilities (I stress ok). The maps it generated worked but were peculiar in layout: all of my experiences with painting in Cararra were on simple props created in and prepared for that environment. Cararra Baking? Convert shaders to maps in export options, or
http://www.inagoni.com/e107_plugins/content/content.php?content.3

An added note, just because: In Hexagon, there's a sort of... Paint on surface feature. But, it's gimmicky, uses only a sort of "paint from texture map" feature that requires one actually to have loaded up textures at different resolutions if one wishes to actually use a different resolution to paint with and it doesn't play well with most new vid-card drivers... In fact, it's barely worth mentioning because it's so limited and buggy... But, it has the feature, no matter how half-heartedly it attempts to provide it. :)

Blacksmith 3D, sold here, allows one to paint on objects, but I don't think it touches anything close to material shaders and baking those.

I'll have to check out the Carrara situation. I haven't used it in ages either but have v.7.

Still think Cararra is a good app, it does alot of different things at varying degrees of success... last I checked Daz still hasn't gotten up to speed on their documentation though, which objectively demonstrates a lack of... Something.

Zbrush really is your best bet...

The original question and all of the responses seem to be trying to create a new texture by various techniques, with varying degrees of automation.

Perhaps the question as given was misleading. Do you really want a new texture or do you want a way to create the effect in Poser, with no work?

I did this combination of existing V4 skin texture and a grass texture I got off the web without making any new texture - just a couple extra nodes in the material room. There are no seams, and I can instantly replace the skin with any other skin, or the grass with any other modifier texture.

Of course, if you really want to make a new texture then proceed with using other tools as previously described.

My technique is this: Load another image in an Image_Map. (Tileable images are best) Set the texture strength to about .7 (adjust as desired) to fade it. Change the Texture_Coords to XY. Change the U_Scale and V_Scale as you see fit - I used 800. To flip vertically use -800 in the V_Scale. You can "move" the image around on the figure using U_Offset and V_Offset - requires experimentation.

Then you combine the original skin with this overlay using a Color_Math node set to Multiply - set both inputs to white - connect the two images to the Color_Math.

Then the Color_Math, which has the combination texture, goes where the original skin texture used to go.

Of course, I did not do this by hand - instead I wrote a script to do it for all the skin zones. Depending on your skills at programming that may be impossible or trivial. SnarlyGribbly may come along and add this feature to EZSkin in which case you can do this with a mouse click.

Nice one, bagginsbill! As I mentioned earlier I imagine one could forego the use of an image map altogether and achieve results similar to OP's original intent with a combination of 3D texture nodes. This would avoid any seam problems and various issues with redistribution of images. Of course alpha masks would be needed to exclude brows, etc. Along these lines of thought, if OP did indeed intend to share the results it would simply be a matter of an .mc6 with an empty image map node plugged into relevant surfaces for the end user to apply whatever textures into the mix... anyway, just thinking out loud.

in case nobody mentioned, poser can create new map using group editor, perspective UVs (camera-mapping).

Thanks, BB! Seams better but needing to adjust the offsets here and there. It makes it quite workable. And yes, an ez-skin feature for this would be great.