Cool. From my experience, deleting edges is fine. As long as you leave the actual vertices untouched you can jigger about with edges and facets and retain morph compatibility.

Caveat: this may not apply to all modellers, and some actions could scramble your UV mapping...

And finally, there's no shame in being a perfectionist IMHO, although it may impact your workflow. ;) 

Thanks @primorge from me also. I hadn't realised that the help file was online. I don't even have EPU installed at the moment, it must have been on a previous computer and I haven't needed it since - but when I do need it I stand a better chance of re-acquainting myself with its functions now!

I've a funny feeling I might need to exhume some long-dead version of .NET Framework before I can reinstall.

I've searched through my saved tips 'n' tricks file, and can't find anything on the subject. I seem to recall that the method I saw was Photoshop specific, and since I don't use PS that would explain why I didn't preserve it.

A .BUM map has information only in the red and green channels: the blue channel is always zero, which explains the khaki hue. From memory, there's a small shift of a few pixels between the two channels, which you'd have to undo to perform an accurate deconversion. If you have an old asset which includes both .JPG and .BUM maps you may be able to reverse engineer the process.

However, bear in mind that there was a bug in the BUM conversion in the Windows versions of Posers 3 & 4. My less-than-scholarly analysis is preserved here, but bear in mind that the links in that article have rotted since Renderosity changed their forum links.

Alternatively, you could just convert those remaining BUMs to greyscale and have done with it. The whole thing seems to be more trouble than it's worth. :)

Ok old timers. Put on your thinking caps!

Does anyone remember what utility was used to convert BUM maps to either JPG or PNG?

I'm updating an old runtime and there are a handful of BUM bump maps in there. 

You can still use .BUM files in Firefly in later Poser versions by plugging them into the gradient bump socket on the Poser surface node.

The IrfanView method for converting .BUM to .BMP will produce a coloured map which is more like a variety of normal map than a greyscale bump map. It may 'sort of' work in some circumstances but won't be strictly correct. There isn't an easy way to deconvert BUM maps, although I have a vague memory of someone posting a method which used Photoshop. If I can recover it I'll update this thread.

noxiart posted at 5:43 PM Sun, 5 February 2023 - #4455368

If I remeber correctly, I think Poser 5 also auto-converted .bum files into .jpg's?

Not quite, sorry. Poser 5 would convert RSR thumbnails into PNG, although that feature was eventually dropped - can't remember at exactly which version.

It fails a more challenging test rather drastically.  An attempt to convert an Antonia Standard texture to the A-mapping made a real mess.  I suspect the different grouping of the two Antonia obj files throws off the polygon, tri, and UV indexing.  I'll try prepping the Antonia files, for a better test.

Agreed, you might try saving your triangulated interim OBJ with only one group. I've only ever used uv2uv on a single-group mesh, and it was hair, coincidentally.

EB, your avatar image reminds me of the little white dot that would appear, as the old CRT televsions were shutting down.  As Neil says, "It must be a really old telly."

Glad to have been of service! I tend to prefer small, simple utilities that do one thing - that said, I'm intrigued to hear that Blender can do it. Is there anything that Blender can't do? (Not trying to start a challenge, by the way.)

Off-topic, you might like to consider editing your signature block at some stage. Not that I mind being thanked for things, but it's vaguely embarrassing when I stopped doing those things three years ago. :) This is where you go to do that: https://www.renderosity.com/settings/forums

Here's another option: a stand-alone Windows utility which is fairly ancient and should work on any machine.

http://www.uv2uv.spacymen.com/

It does exactly what you want, assuming I've understood you properly. The inputs are two OBJ files composed only of triangles, with your source and destination UV mappings; and a texture map for the source OBJ which has to be in BMP format. The output is the map transformed to fit the destination OBJ, also in BMP format.

Converting back and forth is an extra few steps, but easy enough to do. UVMapper will triangulate the input meshes for you; you don't have to keep those interim files of course.

Here's an even simpler FireFly version. Just diffuse -> step -> blender is enough. [...]

I didn't have time last night to sit down and think through the math(s) nodes, but they gave the impression of overkill at the time. Neatly simplified! Also thanks to @hborre for the Superfly version.

Encouraging to see that the good old forum samizdat still works. Now I should try to remember to put this to work next time I have a single sided mesh.

My archives contain this alternative approach which extracts the diffuse node's Normals_Forward function to drive a blender. Author unknown, unfortunately, I only saved the screenshot (dated July 2008) - nor do I know enough to guarantee that it's an improvement. Offered without warranty for further discussion. :)

(and of course this is Poser 7 vintage and has no relevance to Superfly, but you knew that...)

[...] I thought I could do this in the animation palette by deleting the first 50 -or so- frames, and then selecting the remaining keyframes, sliding them over to replace the ones I deleted.

Chiming in late here, but drag-and-drop in the animation palette never seems to give me the expected result. I don't know if that's Poser's fault or mine, to be absolutely fair. :)

I would do this purely with copy and paste:

1 - Select the second half of your animation and hit Ctrl-C to copy it.

2 - Select the first half and delete it.

3 - Select the block where you want your second half to go - this can include frame 1 if you want - hit Ctrl-V to paste

Actually I often retain frame 1 as a "home" frame that isn't included in the timeline, where everything is at zero position / pose etc. It can sometimes make things easier.

Also, full disclosure, I rarely make animations as such; but I do use the animation palette in nearly all scenes to hold a series of sequential frames that will become part of a comic strip or similar format.

You can always render the preview window in the material room, it will give you a smaller image.

Good trick. I have a collection of UI dots with various document window sizes so I can do this in the pose room too.

the raytraced preview does work with superfly, at least for simple shaders. I didn't try complicated ones. If you're working with firefly, you can use the progressive mode.

To be fair, the RT preview doesn't always accord with complex Firefly shaders either. There's always something that can only be caught by a full-on test render, but at least the preview helps to eliminate a lot of the early boo-boos.

Thanks for reminding me about progressive mode. If I set render dimensions to 'Match Document Window' it's helpful for a lot of the things I use RT preview for: checking lighting and reflections, and whether there's a forgotten single-sided wall in the way of the camera! I might now use that more often, since the bigger render is useful, it won't wreck my portrait previews, and a lot of the time I think it will be faster than the RT window because I can cancel as soon as the error appears.

As I suspected, thanks. I don't know what technology is behind the raytrace preview but ISTR it predates Superfly, and if it's Firefly related I doubt it will get any further development budget.

Laura: notifications do seem to be behaving properly now, going by what I've seen from a conversation I'm having in another thread. Thanks for taking a break from the coalface to report back!

Email sent.

odf posted at 9:49 PM Thu, 17 February 2022 - #4434909

In the future I will simply end a large portion of my comments with "[rant deleted]."