cobalt, great tips!!!

thanks nick! I already have UVMAPPER PRO on the oc side of this map, my partner said I would need it someday, although I have never used for anything else then looking at .obj files. So what do I do with that and the zygote lion? I do have that file you mentioned. Do I somehow use that in UVMAPPER and apply the BigFaceLion texture map? ur helps is really appreciated!

thanks nick! I already have UVMAPPER PRO on the oc side of this map, my partner said I would need it someday, although I have never used for anything else then looking at .obj files. So what do I do with that and the zygote lion? I do have that file you mentioned. Do I somehow use that in UVMAPPER and apply the BigFaceLion texture map? ur helps is really appreciated!

Quote - About the Lion. Unfortunately the stock P4 Lion is not the best mapped. Depending on budget and amount of realisim two alternatives are the BigFace Lion from http://www.3dmenagerie.com/, free, Or the MilBig Cat set from daz3d.com not free

Nick, very helpful! But I can't make heads or tails, pardon the pun, out of BigfaceLion, as it seems to be based on something called P4 Lion, which I don't think I have in Poser 7 for mac. I do have Zygote Animals (which I thought was part of DAZ animals purchased). Bigface lion apparently needs the Poser4 obj, as when I remapped the DAZ lion with the bigface texture, some of it fits, some parts do not. MilCat looks grand on the website, but my gosh 40usd for a lion! I could buy a real one here in nepal for that price. Well, almost...the one in our only zoo looks pretty sad and would probably go cheap. Hmmm..so what to do?

that did it again john, thx!

thanks silke, will do!

thanks all for the great info! i am working on this image and having a clean transparent png will allow me to move it around at will during the editing process... ps. if anyone has tips on making DAZ animals look right, they would be appreciated. The lions mane looks like plastic and his fur is screwed. The monkey looks flat but that may be the lighting. The zebra is okay but i had to brush out strange reflections there. Is it the quality of the product, or the ineptness of the user? thx...

Quote - I have no Mac experience, sorry... All I can suggest is to try it and see. If it does work, post here so others can benefit from the knowledge!

Works great on a mac, albiet a little slow to read things. But I've noticed that to be true of most apps running in windows and trying to read the mac drive. thx.

well that clears that up, thanks!!!

Dear english bob, that tool looks like it rocks. thanks! downloading now. Do u think there is any problem running that on the intel side of a mac using Parallels to manage my poser 7 mac library? hoping it will be well...

Silke, thanks for that. It does work on this mac. Transparent areas in the imagemap show thru the diffuse color. But now that I know how to do this, I am not having good results...actually my own maps look fine but the stock maps for DAZ animals looks like crud for some reason. See the lion in the attached. It's using the imagemap supplied by DAZ but looks very strange. The imagemap itself looks okay, but they sure didn't color within the lines very well. Maybe that's the problem, or maybe it's something else I can't figure out. The zebra is okay I guess, but the monkey looks real flat. I guess this all takes a lot of tweaking and I am not sure where to begin...thanks for any tips in advance!!! Contest Entry Draft... http://www.extreme-nepal.com/forumboards/DVD_Game_Cover.jpg

replicand, is there a tut somewhere on point lights to specific characters and excluding others? I know in other 3d packages u can do, say point a spot on one character and not another, or exclude parts to light and parts to not, etc. I could not find in poser...and that light ball is a pain in the butt yes? :)

Bear, great question! Dad, good answer. But I am looking for something a little more automated, and on a mac. I tried Hogsoft PBoost and managed to screw up my PC runtime on one system, so I was not impressed. And then I tried Poser Content Manager from www.colossusentertainment.com (free) but it only archives/catalogs new things added, and won't show you a listing of everything, and also does not work on mac/intel. I am starting to think that if there is no third party widget to catalog and vue on a mac, that maybe I should just use lightroom or aperture or something like that, but I think those tools won't show a thumbnail for anything but standard image filetypes...hmmmm.... I tried once with multiple runtimes but I am so unorganized without software help, I wound up with multiple runtime confusions and characters breaking. Maybe we are asking for a miracle...

Thanks for that aardvark, in this case the jpg is 216k and png is 256k...hmmm is there another way to get transparency in image maps then or should i just do everything using ps filters/layers?

Quote - Select the animal, and click on the Materials tab to go the the mat room.  Set the diffuse color to white.  Right-click on the blank area to the right and choose New Node--2D textures--Image map.  Drag from the plug icon in the upper left to the diffuse recepticle on the Poser surface box.  That should connect it.  Click on the word "None" and you can browse to the image you want to use.

Repeat for each material that uses the map.  Use the Materials drop down at the top to pick material zones.  When done click on the Pose tab to go back to the Pose room.

John

John, that's awesome, thanks! btw, is it an acceptable practice to leave transparency in the image map and use the underlying diffuse color when coloring a character? (saved file as .png instead of .jpg) Thanks again for such quick help!!!