to rjandron and stndesign, and anyone else who might be listening in.

The free version of UVmapper wasn't much use to me beyond the basic which LW is quite cabable of doing. I asked about UVmapper Pro because as rjandron said, "you want to avoid the distortions.
As my method has been (via a tutorial) to make a morph and un-weld and then un-wrap the image by hand I am still faced with moments of human vs mesh moments when I have to guess-timate what would be the proper way to flatten the geometry. In my case I am looking at a car body and its intimate details. Cars don't generally need a lot of texture like human skin but in my case where I'm distressing the car, it is very ugly to see on skin or car that the texture is stretching. 

$60 bucks is well within the envelope of reasonable if it helps unwrap a complex object so that painting is not impossible. Clearly, many people do it every year creating assets for film and games so there must be a good method. I am currently still prying vertices apart in a desperate attempt to make a map that I let alone anyone down the assembly line might be able to work with when creating new textures. 

I'll look into it, thanks, rjandron.

don

 UVMapper Pro is a stand alone app. UVMapper is free or was when i downloaded it. 
the MTL import/export is a free download that lives in your Lw plugins. 

If Poser reads the .mtl  when you import the .obj it might save you some time setting up in Poser, I don't use it in that direction, only when I'm going from Poser into LW. 

Wait. You don't have LW? Your opening line beginning this thread was "I have a Lightwave character" !!! Silly me jumping to conclusions. 

Well, I was going to say for a good definition of UV hit help button in LW. 

UV is another set of numbers applied to all the geometry so that they "tack down" the texture map image to the geometry so that it doesn't slide around if the geometry deforms. That is my "less than perfect" take on the definition of UV. A google would probably be better.

 Well, let me ask you this, as I don't have UVMapper Pro. How does it handle those objects better?

Currently, my method (learned via some tutorial) is to make a morph target and un-wrap the object by hand and then generate the UV's. There is also the method of making a cloth simulation and letting the object rest on a flat surface. Both methods require some unwelding in strategic places.

I'm always interested in hearing possibilities that might free me from one of the chores of modeling.

Gather 'round, kids. Granpa's gonna tell y'all a story. (he he)

The .mtl was the only way of editing materials with Wavefront 1.0. Eventually there was an editor but I spent too many hours just trying numbers and rendering to see what if I got the material setting right. (shivers)

Yes, MTL Imp/Exp. Fantastic, forgot to mention it. Although I don't use the .mtl for exporting into Poser.

 If you're in LW why not generate the UV's there?

 Currently doing something similar myself. The only way I have been doing it is:

Building my lwo, UV mapping, making textures

Export lwo from LW9.3 as obj

Import obj in Poser 7

Open material editor and load images for color, displacement and reflection.

Go to setup and rig character. 

Voila

continue to tweak

Karosnikov, I know you said "cheap nasty". And I'm going to agree with you. The tutorial image was quite tasty where your 4 layer version has a completely different flavor. Depending on the style of the story, sometime one needs nasty. But Akhiris is clearly going for that clean look without sacrificing the detailed line work. I've been dissappointed with the sketch functions in PS and Poser. Edge detection most often will introduce noise that I originally sought to flatten or break the line once I have reduced the noise. Akhiris, by hand, 8 HOURS! Can you imagine working on an animation @ 24 frames per second? If you go for it, my recommendation would be to first reduce your animation by a third, do the rotosoping, and then multiply your rotoscoped frames X 3 to get the speed back to what it was. It will be a little steppy but you will save a third of your lifetime for soaking your wrist in ice. ; ) I had to rotoscope all the major events of the 20th Century and compress them into a 1 minute open. I had two other artists assisting me with the roto and an editor to help measure the timing so we only rotoscoped the bare minimum. Most of the "events" were done on twos or threes. It took about a month to complete. But we also didn't have any software to do tweening.

No no, not trying argue anything let alone semantics. The tutorial is good, short but good. I just used the Poser output to swf mode two days ago and thought that it also got close to that Scanner Darkly look. But I ditched it in the end because it wasn't really solving my problem either. All the automatic effects just aren't personal enough to give that organic look. The thought of working four to five hours per image @ 24 frames per second. It would be my worst rotoscoping nightmare, almost. There were some very nice looking scenes in that film. Good Luck with yours.

Akhiris, maybe you figured it out from the above article but if not here is my opinion as a person who has spent way too many hours/years rotoscoping by hand and with splines. First, maybe we are divided by a word, rotoscoping. Your goal is a look akin to Scanner Darkly and they used rotoscoping but ... Rotoscoping is just the act of tracing the motion of the photographic elements so they can control the image. If you're doing 3D renders like "Lost" then there is no need to rotoscope. One, its a still image and two, your 3D app will output any matte file you would want to exert the control you would need to process the image in the way that you want. Doing anything by hand would be insanity. Unless... you wanted to render your character and then redraw by hand a completely new head, body, whatever. Rotoscoping was mandatory for Scanner Darkly because it was all live action and came with no mattes for seperating all the elements. I'm not sure if any of this gets you closer to what you're aiming for. I hope it helps.

Cintiq, no. I did try one out at Siggraph once. Given the hours I put in, having the monitor upright and lifting my arm to paint on the screen would be debilitating. So, I would reccommend laying it flat. I'm not sure I'm sold on the idea though. I'm happy enough using an Intuos 6x8 (currently on a single screen). I've been using tablets now for 24 years and am very comfortable not having my hand in the way of what I'm drawing. The big tablets I referred to were on a Quantel Paint Box, the pen was like a soldering gun, attached with a cord and heavy, it got quite warm with use and the tablet had to be "combed" with a big magnet from time to time. Seems quite barbaric now. Because of the Quantel years I feel very comfortable using a pen with menus like Photoshop or Lightwave. It feels much faster than the mouse. Since I mouse:right-handed and stylus:left-handed its good switching back and forth and keeps one wrist from being overly taxed. I guess that doesn't clarify anything except that I'm comfortable with tablets.

muller252, I'm sure you've figured out by now, there is no right answer to your question until more specific needs start to define what "best" might mean to you. For years I used a 24" x 24" tablet and swore that it was the only way. My criteria was that I was doing a lot of painting and needed it for those big "expressive" strokes. Time went by and for a while I had no tablet. When i got one, desk space was at a premium and I was stuck with a small tablet. I don't do much "wild" painting anymore so the small (6x8) tablet has never cramped my style. I always believed a smaller tablet would not be accurate or allow for good details. So, far that has not been the case. Hawkfyr's tablet does seem like it would be too small, especially for a two monitor set up and the Graphire is a lower resolution tablet, I believe. Unless you are painting or using the tablet as your main interface control the majority of the time it doesn't seem that big tablets make practical sense anymore. I would love to hear someone explain real reasons why I might need to go back to a big tablet. Why? Because if it were true I'd want to know.

Yeah Eroc, hi. Went to your website, had no problem with viewing it and thumbs/everything loaded quite quickly. Why would you want Photoshop? So you could let people know how great your aviation paintings are. I like them but they are in serious need of some color correction. They are all suffering from lack of lumens. If you were going to clean up and finish off the "Super Mom" logo, Photoshop would be a great place to do that. As an architect perhaps you're used to using a mouse. You would want to get a wacom tablet and pen. I'm sure that can't be daunting to you as you had plenty of drawings/painting on your site. I have always loved Painter for its custom brushes' ability to mimic old world media but when it comes to the more serious business of manipulating the image Photoshop has been honed over many years to provide the ultimate image editing environment. I'm sounding like a brochure now so I'll stop. Good Luck, Don

I used to think that After Effects was just for animating but have found it very useful doing my strip, which I guess is just a staccato animation. No doubt, AE is a big ticket item. I'm not sure that i agree with thundering1 that AE won't let you do the "extensive compositing of multiple images/renders/passes that Photoshop can". Most of the filters in AE are from Photoshop and then a "skad" more from other sources. (That's a full skad, btw). But then, I'm also only speaking from a Photoshop 7 POV, I've never stepped inside CS. If you're making still images, you could easily keep a lot of that cash and make some custom brushes in Photoshop. I've also been a big fan of Painter and it's Image Hose. All the Liquid Stealth pics were posted in Photoshop with occasional quick trips to AE and/or Painter.

Attached Link: Some of my smoke

Attached Link: Dan Ablan

"Kittie Porn" OMG, how did I not see that one coming? But then, how could I have stopped it? : ) I'm not a cat fanatic by any definition but that gif animation is hysterical. I don't care where you're from, that's funny right there.