A lot of old P4 mats were set up to change just one feature of a material, a new texture in the diffuse channel for example, those mats will cause the whole material to reset in later versions of poser, including removing other material settings, sometimes there is nothing to it but to completely recreate the material preset.

as I recall you have to use the background render feature(or whatever they call it) to access the 64 bit renderer.

Attached Link: http://www.daz3d.com/i/3d-models/training-materials/figures-characters-and?item=9166&cat=943&_m=d

actually the book isn't on character creation and isn't by DAZ, it is a guide to using DAZ studio (and is an actual book not an ebook).  But it does indeed include free versions of Carrara and Hexagon.

pjz99 is right, uv mapping a sperical shape is always going to be a tradeoff, the whole purpose of uv mapping is to take a 3D shape and turn it into a flat surface so that a flat image can be applied to it, think about trying to flatten out a basketball without stretching out the surface, the only way you can do it is to slice it into a lot of pieces. so what you end up with is a map that's hard to deal with because you end up with seams between the split pieces. or you can try to map it as one continuous piece which is what spherical mapping attempts to do but than you are effectively squashing the surface flat, which means stretching, resulting in distortion.

In this case if it were my model I think I would split the whole helmet map down the middle with each side being a separate piece, than you can flat map them and stretch them out along the edge where the seam is somewhat to help minimize the stretching and that ridge down the middle would hide the seam for the most part.

yeah figure height in the poser figure dropdown is a legacy feature, from what I recall it last worked properly with the P4 figures, they pretty much abandoned supporting Figure Height when conforming clothing was developed and any kind of scaling became a problem with the clothing.

yeah its not too hard if you are not concerned about morphs. if you want to preserve the morphs in the coat, than its a different matter and you might be better off going with transmaps to lose the polys you want gone or changing the material grouping.

Higher resolution geometry isn't going to fix the problem with figure joints. the limitation for the most part is the rigging system itself, but a lot of that can be overcome with joint controlled morphs, or added ghost bones to some extent. the reason that you don't see super accurate joints even with those options tends to be that if you get too complex it can get to the point that the figure becomes near impossible to support with conforming clothing, which despite the advent of Dynamic clothing is still the most popular solution for poser users.

to be balanced, they promoted dynamic cloth in studio in the same way they promoted every new major feature of their software, they put as much if not more promotion into AniMate for example. and its not like they are flooding their own store with Studio dynamic clothing even though they have the monopoly on production right now, which would definitely be something they would do if your theory was accurate.

Quote - > Quote - well I think of it like GI, both Poser 8 and Studio Advanced now have methods of doing images using GI, but do we see a lot of images in the galleries using it? No, and why not? my guess is because of much longer render times. even if a solution is better and more realistic doesn't mean it will take over the market, ease of use and time spent are still huge factors in our market.

Ah, the rare and elusive "Make Art" button.

I'm not immune to it either, after all I still use pre-made poses and such to save time, and won't buy a product without DS mat presets. if "make it easy for me" wasn't a huge market half the products in the stores might not exist.

well I think of it like GI, both Poser 8 and Studio Advanced now have methods of doing images using GI, but do we see a lot of images in the galleries using it? No, and why not? my guess is because of much longer render times. even if a solution is better and more realistic doesn't mean it will take over the market, ease of use and time spent are still huge factors in our market.

so DAZ is singlehandedly holding back poser dynamic cloth production from content creators? Sorry I disagree. Dynamic cloth came out before DAZ studio was released and really well before Studio became popular (and DAZ to this day still doesn't require studio support from merchants whom they broker), and in all that time it never really made major inroads in the marketplace at any store (and those who have released dynamic content have reported lackluster sales). It has nothing to do with DAZ, and everything to do with the fact dynamic cloth is very time consuming to use, Most users want quick results, which generally means conformers. Not saying that there isn't a place for dynamics in our market, but if most users want speed than the demand isn't going to be enough to really support a robust market until using dynamic clothing approaches conformers in speed.

Quote - sigh

Which won't work with posers 5 6 7, since they require a default runtime INSIDE Program Files with their install. ....

Actually they dont, I have 5,6 and 7 installed  in an external drive and they work fine(actually they even work fine from that external drive from both XP and Win7 64bit running dual boot. never had to reinstall them for the new OS). what they require is the primary runtime be within the poser folder along with the software.

Quote - hmm, I need to check that , I have routinely saved  figures with installed morphs , and I dont ever remember having a problem injecting other morphs to tyhe figure in a scene.

you wont if you have already installed and innitialized them before saving the figure. becouse the blank morph channels even if the morphs were not loaded are saved with the figure, it is only EXP based figures and new exp packages that were added after resaving the figure that will run into this issue, such as the issue that the OP describes.

no unfortunately renaming isnt the issue, the issue is that the V4 Base has a set of readscripts that tell poser to go to a certain spot and collect the morph channels found there, and load them. as soon as you save the figure to a new cr2 or pz3, poser saves the morph channels and not the readscripts thus freezing the figure from being able to add new channels. you could manually add those new channels but it would be a royal pain to do so becouse you would have to add the blank channels to each bodypart.

OK first off the theory that uv maps are supposed to be square and not rectangular is not true. in fact uv maps can be any rectangular shape you want and will work just fine. while some uv mapping programs will only show show maps in a square format that is only their display limitation, but that doesn't really mean that the map in it's final form must be square.

SamTherapy, your concept is sound, and it would be an elegant partial solution to the problem, though of course you still would have to deal with seams (even the bearskin method has seams to deal with) just not as many of them, and while bearskin mapping is certainly going to provide the least amount of seams it is also the method that is prone to the most amount of mesh distortion. the question I have though is that now that there are cheep solutions on the market for true 3D painting for fixing seams, such as 3D Coat, and Blacksmith 3D, is it really so crucial to have those old distorted bearskin maps anymore?