Hey I know this is not a Poser question but I am hoping some one can help. I am using UVMapper to assign groups to make an object to make a figure for Poser. My question, is there away to zoom in to and area so it is easier to pick areas? Also is there any other ways to pick areas than using a banding bow? It makes it hard to pick small areas.

No, there's no real way to zoom in... but what I do is I select the faces for a given group, and drag a corner of the selection so I can pick out individual facets, then select the single group, assign it, and hit the "" key, which toggles visibility. I then go through the assigning groups, turn all the groups back on with the "", then give it a single UVMap, and choose "Color by Group" to make sure I don't have any broken groups. -Then- I save an intermediary step. Finally, I give it the actual UVMap that is going to be used for the final model, and save it again.

Banding bow? you mean marquee selection? (click and drag to draw a rectangle over your areas?) As far as I've seen there is no zoom on the free version. You can select areas that have a material, region or group assigned. Which does you no good if your are assigning stuff from scratch. What I often end up doing is expanding my work area to fill my entire monitor - then squishing the uvmap down to fit in one corner. Then I pull the areas out I want to fiddle with and make them bigger. After I'm done with those I put them very small on the other side of the screen and work on the next part. After I've gotten all the sections mapped to my satisfaction, then comes the annoying part - making all the pieces larger, and fitting them onto the map. It can be a lot of work - but a good map can make or break a model :) Good luck! Lyrra

Speaking of UVMapper, is the Pro version available yet? And is it available on Renderosity?

try this,select a group or mat hit the "*" button on the numberpad to enlarge the selection, hit the "/" on numberpad to reset the scaling.maybe that helps you

Have any Poser users tried LithUnwrap yet? It's a freeware utility similar to UVMapper, with additional functions like zoom, 3D preview, and alpha channel extraction. It supports other 3D formats in addition to .obj. You can use it for file conversion, too.

I've been wanting to look into that Little Dragon :). Laurie

Whoops, forgot to include a link!

Look here, Laurie:
LithUnwrap

I just looked at LithUnwrap and it will not work with the object file I have it tells me I have too many groups and I ounly have the normal body groups. It maybe a nice program when the bugs are fixed. Maybe it's the size of my object file it has over 23,000 vertices, 22,000 textures, 23,000 normals, 41,000 facets in 17 groups. It's a little high conpared to other files I have looked at.

I admit, LithUnwrap is intended for lower polycounts (although it did accept a 15000-poly character model I'm working on). I've had trouble importing the default .obj files that come with Poser, but all of the stuff that I've created (and exported from Poser in .obj format) has worked so far. 22000 textures?

Sounds like you did some nastiness in your modeler. Just at a guess - you had an auto material setter on and did alot of replicating objects? or perhaps you separated polygons and its reading each one with a different texture? at which point the textures'll be the least of your problems (wince) You should go back and check your geometry before going further. From what I understand, Poser is picky about its polygons - so if it's not poser friendly you'll waste all your mapping time if you have to fix the mesh later down the road. But don't take my word for it - I'm not a modeler:) I just texture things. Try asking over in the character creator forum - somone there should be able to help you with mesh/unwrapping trouble too. Lyrra

Val, I'm on the list to be advised when the Pro version is available. So far, no emails. Not sure where it's being sold either. Geez, I'm no help today LOL

Attached Link: http://www.uvmapper.com/uvmappro.html

LithUnwrap import/export OBJ files with no problems, including OBJ materials and textures. It's totally compatible with Poser and works fine for me. You just can't load anything over 65535 vertices or 65535 polys. This is limitation that the program sets. There are also limitations on the number of groups and materials you can load. It is not a bug. Besides, I think anyone trying to UV map such a huge model should get a program that handles high poly models. If you read the webpage, the program is for low poly modelling. And it looks like it does everthing UVMapper does, and everything UVMapper Pro does too, and more! And it's free! What more could you ask?

A lot of programs see the Zygote/Daz models as having hundreds or thousands of groups. Painter 3D was one of them. Most of the obj files in the geometry files have the groups spread all throughout the vertices, mostly because they actually use a different set of groupings when they are building the model.

I see a couple potential problems with Poser OBJ files.

Some Poser OBJ files contain group tags with the same names, so
some programs who think every group tag is unique, will try to
create all those groups, which could be hundreds of groups,
when actually there are only a dozen or so.

Also, a lot of Poser OBJ files terminate each line with only a
line feed, not the typical line feed+newline pair. This looks
like a black square in MS Notepad, because there is no newline
character. This is bad for programs not expecting this, because
the program might think the entire file is on a single line,
so it won't find anything.

But you can easily fix the second problem, by copying and pasting
the entire OBJ file into MS WordPad, and save the file as a text
document. This should add the line feed+newline tags back to
the text file.

Probably have to email the author about the first problem.
Seems like an easy fix though.

The OBJ files are (mostly) mac formated files. Macs terminate lines (IIRC) with a ctrlM, not the ctrlJ that most other OS's use. Some of the files have even weirder line endings. This caused me more than a bit of trouble trying to write scripts to reprocess poser OBJs.

There is a way to zoom using the free version of UVMapper but it's a little bit of a pain to use: Start by selecting all (control+a) and press the keyboard '*' key until you zoom in as far as you'd like. Then left click on the selection and drag it to display the part you'd like to edit. Press enter and edit that section. Repeat as necessary. When you're through, select all (control+a) and press '=' to resize selection to the full screen (this will be much easier in do UVMapper Pro) As for the comment about other programs doing everything UVMapper Pro does, I think you're mistaken =) Just to name a few things UVMapper Pro does that I haven't seen other programs handle - spreading facets, creating hard edges in Poser, correctly triangulating concave facets, smoothing functions, reordering vertices for morph targets, unlimited vertices/facets, properly handling Wavefront obj files, etc, etc, etc... =) I think I have the programming just about complete on UVMapper Pro and am working on the help file now. I hope to be able to send everyone who asked to be notified a note in a week or so. I hope everyone is having a happy holiday season =) Steve

WAHOO!!!! Will it be available here on R'osity?

Attached Link: http://www.uvmapper.com

"...open, ...open, ...open" :-)

Yay! I have no credit cards, the only way I could purchase something would be through store credit.

Yay! Great news Steve :) I certainly plan on getting the pro version - even if I don't know what half of what you just said means. Consider me an intermediate user :) Please tell me it has an undo feature ok? I can't tell you how many times I had to start over 'cause I let go in the wrong place :P Lyrra Madril

Attached Link: http://www.geocities.com/lithunwrap