I'll see what I can get with compose. I'm trying to get some thigh boots and all I can find is a set that comes with an included figure which I don't need. :)

To Buck: On that render with white background problem. My poser manual suggests making a render using silhouette mode and bring that and your actual image render into a 2D app to make a mask to rip out the background with. Of course that won't work for your downloaded alien pic. For that you need photoshop 5.5's new background stripping features.

I'll agree with Allerleirauh on that pet peeve. I hate having to cancel out over and over as it looks for each texture. Writing them down as I go, then opening up all the jpgs and saving them as whatever. I also use tif's on my win 98 machine fine. :) Odd that some people would have trouble there. To: Buck: are you aware that using gif support s illegal now without a heafty license fee to Unisys? http://slashdot.org/articles/99/08/29/0722236.shtml

I use win 98 on my PC and poser 4. No problems with tif files. Odd.

jmoore: that's interesting as I have photoshop 5 and 5.5 on both my PC and my MAC and I can use both forms of tif (PC and Mac) on both machines with no problems. I can also open the tif's in poser 4 on both the Mac and the PC. The tif's open in every graphic app I have. photoshop 5 does have a 1-10 scale. 5.5 has a full blown 1-100% scale for both jpg and gif (it's the only app out there at present that can make lossy gifs). To transfer files between the two I write them to a CD-RW in ISO 9660 format (I have CD-RW drives on both machines). On the perfect pitch question... No. I do work in a graphic design shop so I consider proper color to be important. What I see on the jpg's is banding. Where there are solid lines that mark off where it transitions from one color to another. On many of them it's as pronounced as the color line where the bottom green bar meets the right vertical green bar on the bottom of pages here on renderosity. Oh and would I download a 2-3 mb zipped tif? I already download character files of that size. So yes. I'd tolerate the extra wait for the quality improvement. The big issue is getting web space on servers to store those files.

Actually I was just editing a tif on my PC in both paint shop pro and photoshop (I switch back and forth). I always thought tif was a natice PC format and was suprised to find it available on the Mac as well. All of the image editors I use on both my PC and Mac save jpeg's in terms of percentage of loss or percentage of non-loss rather than a flat 1-10 scale. What are you using to image edit? Even at 0% loss/100% image the jpg's don't look as good as the tif's, bmp's, psd's (photoshop), cpt's (corel), png's (fireworks) or psp's (paint shop pro). I don't have painter on either machine and corel's only on my PC (is there even a mac version?). I've yet to look at a p3d file in a flat display to compare it but I would assume the same. the jpg routine is a lossy one and there is always some level of degredation. By the way the tif I was working on was saved on my MAC in photoshop using the MAC setting for a tif and then opened on PC. Saved in photoshop and later opened on the PC in both paint shop pro and photoshop. JPG's compress well. I use them in my webwork when I need small files with more than the 216 websafe colors. But I never make a statement of quality or color purity behind them. They're just too lossy for it.

Really? My natural inclination from the other graphics work I've done was to blur everything and anti-alias. I'll give the sharpening a try tomorrow. Using the advice of larger texture maps I got somewhat better results. But my 2048 by 2048 texture map tif is 12 mb in size. :) When I add on the textures I'll be doing for the boots, mask, and gloves it'll be one huge tax on memory to use this figure...

I just made backups of all the files before putting the patch in place. One thing I noticed was that some people complained about the unitard but my copy of the patch did not have a new unitard.

One thing I'll add. The stuff I've downloaded from here and the various Poser sites I've found have more than tripled the value I see in the program. By itself poser is a nice application. With the help of all these add ons it has become quite a creature.

Personally I would suggest people start posting their texture maps as bitmap or tif files. Most jpg files are so distorted as to be virtually unusable. They make for a decent web display format but not for using in work. I for one would be willing to wait the extra time to download a bitmap or tif over a jpg. I'd also not mind their being less texture files out there due to disk space limits if those out there were of higher quality. I see some great renders from the photo realistic textures but only from the authors of those textures. By the time the jpg versions get out to the rest of the world they have solid blockly color seperations and blurs. So then the only issue is weather there are any differences in quality and what you can do with them in terms of bitmaps and tifs. For those trying to decide what format to use locally for their own textures. I'm gathering there really isn't much difference if any.

Didn't even know this existed...

Yeah. jpgs are always a little lossy. It 'bugs' me that people who give out textures zip up jpgs and not bmp's or tifs. Of course who am I to complain on something for free. :) But I always notice the colors are dithered or splotchy and I can't get the same detail I see in their renders. I for one would be willing to spend the extra minutes in download time to get a zipped up bmp/tif over a zipped up jpg. On the increments of 256 in the size... That's interesting. It wouldn't suprise me. But it is odd that they chose a size of 950 for the tif's on the poser CD. I'll try making a new UVmap in UVmapper. Yesterday I finally got it to line up right by accident with the same pattern as the ones on the CD in all of painter 3D, Poser, and UV mapper. So if I can remember what I did to get that I'll make a new larger template and try and work from that. 2048 sounds good. Extremely huge so it should map great. I've got this old colored pencil drawing from the 80's I did of a super heroine character of mine from an RPG (vilains and vigilantes) and I want to use her for the 'hostess' to a super hero website... So I need to make a Poser character. A good opportunity to learn a lot.

Cool on the combines. I was worried that if I had to make new textures I'd lose a LOT of detail. As for my texture map for the letotard. It's a 950 by 950 tif saved out of a photoshop file of the same size. I only used jpg to post this image here. I was very careful in my compression for this posted jpg. It does match what I got from my renders, what was on the poser screen, and what the tiff looks like. I've posted the tif here: http://www.atless.net/~arcady/LeotrdTmplte.tif But be warned, it's a 2.6 MB file. :) To build it I started with the tif image on the Poser 4 content CD. I drew on a second layer in photoshop and then hid that layer in my tif saves. The preview you see above is a screen shot of the photoshop image with my 'white' layer turned off. I then imported that tif into Painter 3D and draped it over the leotard object (used UVmapper to make it one object I could work with), Here I zoomed in and dropped in a pixel of red here and there where I could. But it refused to take on that bit of bleed up on the top there...

One other thing. Eventually I plan to make a combined object of this, the body figure, and the other clothing items (mask, gloves, boots, super heroine gadgets). Should I then not even be making a texture map of this object but instead just one for the combined figure? Or can I still use this in the combined?

I've been trying to make my own first texture map. a superheroine costume on the leotard. Simple white with a plain red straight lined stripe... It's not easy. In the preview windows it's completely blurry with lots of bleed. On the flat texture map it's nice smooth lines that follow the curve of the grid. When it renders it's back to 'almost nice' lines with one or two small bleed spots. and a few areas where the curve is jagged... Very different in all three formats...