mystic...  postwork?  like not on the skin, just on the render?

   i've had some success putting a tattoo on a figure in photoshop, using shapes. 

http://bloodsong13t.deviantart.com/gallery/34735447#/d4ph2iv  (contains nudity, so probably wont display if you dont have a devart account.)

http://bloodsong13t.wordpress.com/2011/12/13/zevrans-tribal-tattoos/  (will work too)

   it's do-able; depending on how much shape-manipulation your version of photoshop has.  for example, you could make all those butterflies a new shape or raster layer very easily.  but look at the 2nd one down.  it has foreshortening where it curves into the dip of the spine.  so you'll have to 'smush' one of its wings.
     you always need to 'bend' the overlying tattoo to follow the surface of the skin.  unless it's a really straight-on shot.  you'll also need to experiment with the blending of the tattoo layers and the underlying skin.  when i was doing zevran's tattoos in the example, i found it worked best to get the ink UNDER the skin by erasing down parts of the tattoo layer that were over highlights on the underlying layer.  i was pleased with the results of that.

OKAY!  i figured it out! 

miss nancy wins the prize!  some IDIOT should have checked the render settings... and make sure 'shadows' were turned on...!!!  i did that, and lo and behold, the AO i expected on the fingers against the skin magically appeared!

::zonk!::

(now to find out who turned the shadows and stuff OFF, so i can hurt him....)

but seriously!  need them basic, start-from-scratch, slow-step-by-slow-step instruction tutorials for these things!

thanks a bunch, guys!

okay...

  if i want to throw out ALL my lights and start from scratch...  what are the steps for that, like in that devil guy's tutorial?

hborre: 'effective distance' of what to what to make the shadows work??

  if i do rip out the lights i have now... and, say, try to do an IDL with a giant sphere thing (do i need to put an actual giant sphere IN the scene, or just a spherical image on the light??)...  do i have to turn OFF the ao in the lights and/or objects?  do i have to turn off the SSS?

   i dunno what is compatible with what, or what most of these settings are for. :X

heyas;

  the free app that is similar to zbrush is sculptris.  and no, you can't do this in that program.  sculptris will entirely re-do the uv map and lay it out in scattered pieces with no stretching, but that results in an entirely human-unreadable uv map.

   i have an old tutorial for help with the painter 3d from p4, and the XX's and all.  you would be especially interested in the copying/pasting/floating/nudging section at the bottom, which is how i made tattoos across the seams.  but again, if its a CURVED seam like on michael 3, this won't really help.  the seams need to be straight.

http://3dmenagerie.com/goodies/tut/p3d.htm

   there is a fix for many old apps originally from the Metacreations stable.

http://dev.depeuter.org/index.htm

   i use it, and it is a life-saver!

i went from p4 to pp12... theyre ALL new light sets :P

   are there any IDL tutorials?

  i dont have a world image.  i just want a dark scene, plain black background, and light that looks like candle/fire/torch light.

   actually, the shadows are not dark enough, but i will try setting them above 1; that's an idea. 

not sure that will help the missing AO or places where shadows just arent.  oh... maybe i can create a light that ONLY make shadows but doesn't light the scene...?

  any other ideas why the ambient won't occlude?  :/

is the back seam straight up and down?  or is it curved?  i was doing one there for M3, and the sucker is curved :X

   with photoshop CS4 (or any with obj support, i suppose), you can create the tattoo as a shape or layer over top the 3d model, then 'drop' it onto the UV map.  robin wood has a tutorial on that:

http://robinwood.com/Catalog/Technical/PhotoshopTuts/PhotoTutPages/CS4-3D-4_Paint.html

   if the seam is straight, you can create the tattoo on a new layer -- two new layers, actually, and stick half onto the uvmap from either side.  but it's a tonne easier when you can see where it is on the 3d model at the same time, which is what i used to do with fractal painter 3d.  which came free on the poser 4 cd in ages gone by, i think.  (or poser 3, maybe.)

   modo can also drop (or shoot) a texture onto a model.  i dont know if blender can...

   what tools do you have for painting and creating the tattoos?

thanks, guys.

  i have XP, sp3.  i will look at my P4 again....  um, where does it say what point version it is?

   though i must say, i am liking pp12.  (except the pieces that tear off accidentally and i can never get them back in the right place...!!)

ahhh... okay.

  thanks guys!

can you say...

a few dozen cds full of content collected over the span of a decade?

can you say...

  shopping at daz, getting new clothes for 2 bucks, the hair i want is on sale, and OH they gave me a voucher, too!

mmm, yeah.  okay, that's money, too.  even replacing ten years worth of freebies.  just... ow.  that would hurt.

it's kinda like the question: macs are so much better than pcs.  why don't you get a mac?

   because of the thousands of dollars worth of windows software i'm sorta married to.  you just can't jump ship like that.

once upon a time...

(what follows is an old geezer telling history to the young'ns.  you can skip it if you want.)

     poser 2 had a menu option to change the figure height/proportions.  infant, toddler, teen, supermodel... and suchlike.  so you threw in the p2 male figure, hit infant, you had a baby.  well, more or less.

   this figure height option only really worked with the poser human figures.  when daz came on the scene (zygote back in those days) with the first michael and victoria, they were totally different.  and totally didn't work well with this figure height option.

(btw, i just looked... that option is still there on the poser pro 2012 menu, so it IS still in there, if you want to play with it.)

   just... from there, figures got more complicated and you couldn't just squash and stretch them like that.  then there was the poser horse.  as you know, there are joint parameters for scaling children and parents when scaling a body part.  try making the poser horse's chest wider on the X scale.  because that thing is as FUBAR as you can get.

   no matter what you did to those scaling parameters, when you X-scaled the horse's chest, one leg went wonky and shrivelled up and the other leg went wonky the other way.

   since about then (poser 3-4), spending time to adjust the scaling parameters has been pretty much a waste of time.  in the case of straight limbs with single parent/child relationships, the default works well enough.  in the case of anything else, it was difficult if not impossible to get any result that actually worked well.

  so.  that's the reason.

out of curiosity, what OS are you using where poser 4 still works?  cuz mine croaked :/

thanks a tonne guys!

   i have a bunch of m3 characters, i don't think i'll try applying any of those unless they blow up.  :X

okay...  saved uncompressed cr2s.

the morph dials in question all have 0 indexes and 0 deltas.  so wtf?  oh wait... did they get erased when i hit 'REM ALL!' and they were deleted, then i hit undo?   i bet that's what happened.  ouch.

1: nope.  right on his head.  no body involved anywhere.

2: if i recall exactly, he's the 2nd figure in this file.  and neither one are/were named figure 1 or figure 2, etc.  they all had names going into it.

crap, i went to poke into the cr2, but its a compressed crz.  grr!

wohoo!

  uh... not about you feeling like a tool, steve. :X  just that i got cool scriptage!  yay!  thanks a bunch!