Attached Link: http://adamsmith.home.attbi.com/seamguides.zip

I was inspired by the works of SnowSultan to make my own victoria template/guide for use in making high-resolution textures (Head 3000, Body 4000). I made these by hand coloring UV templates I exported from UVMapper, and I have tried to match the edges to the SnowSultan originals wherever it made sense to (also to avoid re-inventing the wheel so to speak). Of course, there are also regions I refined and spaces I filled in which have arbitrary new coloring. In particular, I did "color-per-facet" marking of the wrists and ankles, regions that have often given me some seam trouble.

The maps also have pixel-accurate materials regions for the lips, nipples, irises and pupils. Slight misalignment in these areas can give significant undesired results, so the extra resolution is entirely justifable here IMHO.

Right now, I'm not putting this in the freestuff section, because of bandwidth concerns, you get this freebie through the link above (until my monthly personal webspace quota is reached each month). I'm open to suggestions on where to host free stuff like this.

If these are helpful, please let me know and maybe I'll do one for Steph too. I've been meaning to work with that model a bit. I don't have Michael though.

-Adam

Really helpful, THANX!

Yes, indeed this will be helpful. I have a question about it -- what are the color codings for? How do I use the colored aspects of the seam guide? THX!

Like-colored facets match up on either side of a seam. For example, if you want to draw a stocking going around vicky's leg, you just need to make sure the top of the stocking lines up with the same color polygon on both the front and back maps. Also, when making a skin texture, you want to avoid any visible seam where the various edges of the UV map pieces meet. After I do both the front and back skin of the figure, I work my way all the way around the perimeter with the Rubber Stamp tool, copying the texture from the edge of the front map to the edges of the back map. This gives a more professional finish than simply outline the map halves with a solid color approximate to the skin tone. So... if you sample from the front texture edge where there is a green facet, you then know to stamp it down on the corresponding green facet edge. The lip, areola and iris color areas show you where to constrain your pasting of these items into. If you draw lip texture outside the area marked in red, it is going to bleed out onto a non-lip part of her face. Ditto for the areolae.. anything outside the magenta region is going to map outside of the areola polygons. -Adam

Okay, I get it. I understood the color coding to a point -- I figured that the red part of the lips is where I should paint the lip color. My question was mainly toward the colors around the head. Upon looking at the the seam guide further I figured out how to use the color coding for those areas. Thanks for the quick explanation and great work on the guide! HORNO

Thank you very much!

Looks like you did a very good job here, and I'm glad that my original guide could help you to make improvements! Hopefully we'll see some great new textures come out thanks to this high-res version. (free perhaps?) ;) Take care. SnowS Hoping his pictures are worth 1001 words.

Thanks SnowS! Your guide saved me from A LOT of extra rounds of back-and-forths between Poser and Photoshop I would have had to do otherwise. Yeah, I'd love some free high-res textures too, but alas they are rare. There is one really stellar one I found in the freestuff so far though, "Kara" by Kristyn. So good it's hard to believe she's giving it away. -Adam

Dude...thank you!

Whoops! Ignore my gender-specific compliment before...I somtimes default into 'valley' before my morning coffee :p

Your picture shows one aspect of this that matching seams will not fix. Look at the width of the template lines on the rendered figure. Even though the body texture is ~1.8 times the size of the head - the lines on the body are much wider. The ears do not match the face and the back of the head does not match the front. If you had shown it, the hands and feet are the same - lines much crisper than the body. The neck to head you can play with, the rest are set. The wider lines also mean that the texture is spread out more. From the render, it is obvious that the difference is significant. The texture will be less dense the wider the black lines and this will make for a seam, no matter if your clone is identical. If your texture is rich, it may help if the clone on the body was much denser than the head. The nozzle/hose for the skin texture 100 pixels for the head, 25 for the body, back of the head, 50 pixels for the hands/feet, 75 pixels for the ears? the ratios are yet to be discovered. This would help a lot in the seam match where the resolution is different. This guide will be spot on for front to back ( except for the groin which is beyond hope). The thing there is to make sure you color outside the lines about half a facet more. You get white lines if you cut it too closely.