Best to save displacement maps as .tif or .psd ?

Best to save Alpha map as a .pds ,.bmp ,.tif

Best to save texture maps as .jpg ,.psd ,.png ,.bmp ,.tif

Best to save bumps maps as .jpg ,.psd ,.png ,.bmp ,.tif

Best to save normal maps as .jpg ,.psd ,.png ,.bmp ,.tif

& if forgot any maps ,fill in the blanks :)

Best to save ??? as ???.?

Thanks

P.S.& it would be cool if we had Vector maps :)

I save everything as a .png so that I can take advantage of alpha channels. But that's just me, and I struggle with materials and textures and maps, so take that for what it's worth.

.psd as archive file, make all relevant copies from the archive file in various formats/bit depth. .png is just a .jpg with an alpha channel, that is, it's a compression format. .jpg is better for a wider range of color, .png is best for BW linework. For very high quality displacements, utilize 16 bit tif.

Zbrush saves out as 16 bit .psd when you export the alpha.

For poser maps I save everything as a high quality .jpg from .psd, powers of 2, sRGB IIC profile. If I have high frequency detail alpha/disp, 16 bit tif (big file though).

On mapping strategies:

Poser scenes can get quite heavy. One prime consideration you have to make, regarding maps, is their file size. Poser will load up as much as you can give it in terms of memory weight. But, it will start randomly dumping stuff once it gets overloaded. Geometry "can" have a big footprint, especially if you're using several characters in a scene with 50k+ polys a piece. But, adding on several heavyweight texture maps, each unique for each character, can put you over a decent memory budge very, very, quickly. Especially with 4kx4k eyeball maps... (Just kidding, kinda.)

The base figure cr2 for V4 is about 20 meg, with nothing but a simple map and deformers. Some of these bits are just instructions for Poser, so they effectively do more than their weight suggests. But, adding on morphs can dump a great deal into a figure in a scene. For instance, I have a dev figure that I play with with lots of custom morphs. It doesn't even have everything I could put into it and it's 200+ meg. That's pretty hefty, but if pile on a good hi-res texture set in jpg format, which is a compressed format, those textures are going to take up an extra 20+meg, alone, which is 10% of that very hefty figure's weight. If you're going for the lightest figures you can get, since there may be many in a scene, you're still looking at 20+ meg for each, unless you're doubling up by using the same texture sets for multiple figures (Which, I believe, Poser handles by instancing on the maps, not loading up multples of each set.) So, the textures you're applying could weigh more than the actual figures, even with compressed file types.

(Note: Unless you're using natively uncompressed images, you're not actually going to "gain" resolution and information by uncompressing a natively compressed image format... ie: Taking a jpg and saving it as a tiff is not going to "reveal" secret, hidden, image information which gives you some sort of visual advantage, since the original never had that information, anyway. AFAIK, Poser treats all image data as just plain "data", with certain exceptions for version and certain file-type specs. But, these can be handled just as easily with a jpg as a tiff/bmp/pds in regards to the Material Room. The only exception may be, as noted, with extreme closeups and with images who's original format is uncompressed.)

What do you need vs how much operating capital you have and what is the final resolution of the texture going to likely be? Remember that resolution doesn't mean squat unless you're going to actually be making use of it. A very lightweight, compressed, jpg texture set is just fine for the diffuse texture of figures that will be rendered at a distance. In that sort of render, the pixel resolution is small in consideration to total render size. But, you may wish to keep a higher resolution for transmaps, since lower resolution in those have the chance of being much more noticeable, especially if you have some procedurals coupled with them.

In Conclusion: To me, there's one Rule that would probably serve just about any situation: Unless you are rendering extreme close-ups, you may not notice any difference whatsoever across the spectrum of compressed-vs-uncompressed formats. And, do not forget that how these maps are filtered in the final renderer matters as well, so selecting None, Crisp, etc.. for your texture filter will matter a bit. (One does have to note that some versions of Poser are more capable than others in regards to map file-types, so I may not be familiar with some versions that make special use of image filetypes.)

Diamonds a low polycount Sub'Ded character of 10 ,000 polygons ,5000 polygons for the eyes with the 8192 x 8192 maps ;) bad joke ,bad joke :)

but Diamond will only work for Poser Pro 14 or higher. unless you use her as a game mesh.

She'll be flat mapped every thing on one map just like game meshes with multiple map sizes 2048 ,4096 ,8192 .

Anyways that's the plan so far.

We have bundles of attempted realist characters. I'm not going for realistic ,I'm going for cool characters :)

Wish Poser had MatCaps

Going back to the original question: I'd avoid BMP altogether (it's a terribly old-fashioned format); I don't think that Poser can read PSD files, but if it can there's no advantage to using that (proprietary) format in preference to TIFF; I'd say PNG and (lightly compressed) JPEG are the best options. For single channel maps (e.g. bump, displacement), consider saving these as grayscale images to conserve disk space.

With an eye to the future, we could see JPEG-XR, PGF or BPG start to replace JPEG and PNG in the next year or two.

Vector artwork is an entirely different kettle of fish to pixel-based images, more akin to a 3D mesh than a photo. Some 3D apps will let you import Illustrator files and extrude / lathe them into 3D shapes.

As far as I can tell, no 3D program (and certainly not Poser) has color management built in (I believe there are plug-ins for C4D and LightWave). They expect incoming images to be in sRGB. No matter what color space you use or how the image file is tagged, Poser will assume that it's sRGB. If your workflow involves any other RGB space (e.g. Adobe RGB), you must save all your assets out in sRGB or you will get all sorts of problems with inaccurate colour.

The TIFF file format - and other less well-known ones such as JPEG2000 and MrSID - support multiple levels of resolution which would have obvious benefits for 3D mapping. The way it works in TIFF - a pyramid structure - creates enormous files. JPEG2000 and MrSID use more elegant and compact wavelet based structures capable of significant compression with both lossless and lossy options.

Is there a character that comes with Pro 14 that is considered to be the best textured ?

As far as I can tell Poser 7 and before all have .jpgs .8 and above have .png

In RuntimeTexturesPoser10Roxie Roxie has 3 maps a Diffuse Color ,Bump/Displacement ,Alternative Diffuse / Alternative Specular All.png

Does Poser support JPEG-XR, PGF or BPG ?

"Is there a character that comes with Pro 14 that is considered to be the best textured ?"

A bit like asking which silverware is the best screwdriver - butter knife, fork, or spoon?

Butterknife.

A needle n spoon will screw you real good.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_RUs6UBm_AY

Roxie,Dawn,G3,V6 all have the same 3 maps . Roxie uses .png .Dawn,G3,V6 uses .jpgs. Roxie,V6 do have normal maps. V6 normal map is .tif.