heyas; this is a completely unsolicited quick review of the free preview rapty by smac. the full version of rapty is in the marketplace, so this also applies to a commercial product, so if you find this annoying, just shove it over in the product showcase forum. first of all, rapty is totally killer! this is a fine, high-quality, detailed mesh. actually, it's a little too detailed; i think it could have worked as well with a less dense mesh. so when you load rapty, poser is gonna go sloooooow! the store specs call for something like an athlon k6 thing and 500m ram or some such, but i can work it (albeit slowly) on my celeron 466 with 196m of ram.

there's no texture with the free preview, you have to make your own. i built a fairly nice one from my brachiasaur (i'm sorry, i can't remember who made the brachiasaur, but it was in free stuff as well). both arms and both legs only use one planar map, but that works okay, because the body only uses one 'side' so the textures will be perfectly symmetrical. the legs have texture stretching, though.

Attached Link: http://www.renderosity.com/gallery.ez?ByArtist=Yes&Artist=bloodsong

sorry :/ the link is there to my gallery, because i made a rapty pic: dusk hunter. i'll shut up now :)

I read that the store rapty comes with a "run" animation also. How does it look?

It's probably the same animation found with the free version. I'll say this much for Rapty ... those arms and hands are a vast improvement over the P4 raptor's.

You mean the Muppet Raptor, little dragon? The P4 Raptor always made me think of a muppet...

I noticed that the textures are all stretched along the upper/lower edges, which implies that UVMapper can't do the DAZ-style maps that would eliminate this planar-mapping stretching effect. I have to say "implies" because I can't use the current version of UVMapper Pro. What method would you use to remap the obj file to eliminate the stretching effect?

You would have to remap the obj, splinting by orientation and spread the mesh out. ~EA

How would you spread the mesh out? Does UVMapper Pro or some other software allow dragging/deforming edge polygons?

heyas; if it were me, i'd grab the edges of the map that's already done and spread those out. but that depends on whether you like the symmetrical skin or not. if you want to paint both sides, you'll have to re-do the whole thing. nyar, you can read through the uvmapper pro tutorial on the uvmapper.com website; which explains how it all works. it's actually something that you do by hand, rather than an automatic mapping style. i haven't tried it yet, but it doesn't seem too hard.

I'm glad to know it's possible, even if I can't use it yet. If Steve does a Mac version of UVMapper Pro, maybe he'll be receptive to the idea of including an automatic algorithm to do the edge-spreading, so that both sides of the figure template will be spread out evenly. One projection-mapping analogy might be "equal-area projection". The camel on the left of ElectricAardvark's attachment appears to use ordinary planar mapping (orthogonal perspective mapping), so all the edge polygons are shrunken in the direction along which they were projected onto the 2D plane.

You can download the free Mac version of UVMapper while waiting for the Pro version to be finished. This will allow you to get comfortable with it. Even the free version has several ways to map an object: planar, box, spherical, cylindrical... and you can choose which axis to orient upon. Carolly

The new commercial version of LithUnwrap, Ultimate Unwrap3D, seems to have an equal-area projection option (Unwrap Faces). It can finally split vertices (Unweld), also!

I didn't like LithUnwrap trying to connect to the internet everytime I started it. It works good though. ~EA

heyas; nyar, the one on the left is a flat planar projection. that's the 'before' image. the one on the right is after you spread the edge facets. i don't know what you mean about the automatic algorithm, have you read the edge spreading tutorial? that explains it better than i can. you can adjust how far into the mesh the spreading affects. for example, instead of just spreading the edge vertices, they sorta drag a number of neighbors along with them, to varying degrees.

No, I haven't read the tutorial, but your summary answers my question. If Steve does a Mac version of UVMapper Pro that includes all the functions of the Windows version, I'll be able to do DAZ-style "equal-area" templates with it.

ElectricAardvark, I think that Bolthouse solved the problem of LithUnwrap being flagged by firewall software with the new version. ZoneAlarm hasn't taken notice of Ultimate Unwrap3D on my system yet, at any rate.

I'll have to try it again. I liked it, but I just didn't like Sygate getting banged every 2 minutes. ~EA