Hi, I've never visited this board because I've never used Photoshop before and stay mainly with Poser. I just came into a copy of Photoshop 4 and would like to reduce the poly count in certain character texture maps so that my images render faster. How do I do this? All input and advise appreciated. Farang

While SteffyZZ has disappeared from Renderosity she pointed out that it was possbile to reduce the resolution of texture maps and thus speed up render time. Maybe "polygon" is a bad choice of words.

Hi farang, resolution is the term you're looking for. Any paint program and many image viewers can be used to resize the texture map smaller, changing the image resolution. Doing so will reduce the file's bytes and it will load/render faster in Poser. A couple suggestions... * When you resize, save the smaller version with a new file name, i.e. don't overwrite the original. There may come a time in the future when you want the higher res version of the texture, so hold onto it. * "Resample" is a term for a more image-friendly manner of resizing the texture. Photoshop has a resampling option, and for something like this texture (or any image that matters to you), using Resample (instead of Resize) is a better choice. More of the detailing from the original is preserved in a better manner. Not so important if you're just reducing a photograph for use on a web page, for instance, but for what you want, Resample is the way to go. Hope that helps! :)

The actual commands in any version of Photoshop are from the top menu: Image, Image Size, and set the units to pixels (inches and pixels/inch are meaningless here). I've heard that Poser will render faster if the width anf height are at even mutiples of 256, I'd suggest 1536 x 1024 or at most 2048 x 1536 pixels is a good size for figure textures.

Also... You may want to optimize your texture image once you've resized it. If you use Photoshop 6 (I can't remmeber if earlier versions have this) choose the "Save For Web" option in the File submenu. This will bring up a new sreen where you can play around with the JPEG settings and view the results/quality before decideing on what compression level to apply. I've used this to shrink textures weighing in at a whopping 2.5MBs down to a more managable 700k without resizeing or loss of quality. Give it as whirl!(It really is much easier than it sounds!)