I agree on Texture Mapper, it's a "Must Have". It also lets you re-arrange (partial or compeltely) an existing texture map. Partial re-arrange is nice if you just want better detail in a few places, but you don't want to be stuck creating complete new texture images.

Thanks! That one works, or at least it did for me.

I took a quick look at the realviz website, and it looks like that's industrial-strength software. I got the impression it's rather pricey. I couldn't figure out what a straight license would cost. They talked about a per-use license costing $1000 for five projects and my wallet cringed.

::Jude applies condiments to foot, then opens mouth:: I've been watching developments in that area, and what I've found indicates the automated stuff works best on objects with well-defined edges and corners, and not so good on organic curvy things. I suspect things could be improved by decorating the object with little dots of paint or little paste-on labels to create easily-identified points on the surface. Even with this, I'm not sure if the software can figure which are the corresponding dots across several pictures. It would really stink to have to click on each dot in each of several images to tell the software which go with each other. You'd need several thousand dots to get a decent-resolution model, and that's a helluvalotta clicking.

I wonder if Renderosity's (and other website) servers can be rigged to reject connections from ISP's that tolerate dirtbags in thier ranks? I'm pretty sure each ISP gets a fixed pool of IP addresses that they assign from as needed when users connect. Maybe whenever anybody from one of the bad ISPs came here, instead of the website they'd get a message saying they can't be allowed access because thier ISP knowingly hosts thieves.

I can NEVER download anything from Free Stuff that's hosted at Geocities. They're almost as bad as AOL.

/dev/null is the "null device". A program can write any amount of data to /dev/null, and it will immediately be discarded. No data can ever be read from /dev/null. The /dev/null driver does not even fetch the data from the user's buffer. The write() handler for /dev/null just returns success every time it's called. Jude

I have a question. How is this thief taking payment? Is he taking credit card payments? If so, has anyone thought about talking to the credit card companies about cutting him off?

Gee, I wonder how long he'll be looking for the OFF switch?

Aha! I knew I was missing something. That certainly makes it much clearer!

That's a great picture. However, I'm not sure if I agree with the implication that the laywer is the most highly-developed form.

Hi again Smallspace. Maybe I spoke too soon (a congential defect, I think). I've usually tried to keep Poser models as single meshes in trueSpace because of the lack of smoothing across mesh boundaries. If I preserve the Poser body part structure in trueSpace, the renderings look like something from Doc Frankenstein's lab. However, preserving the body part structure is NOT the same as "Decompose into objects", because most of the body's skin is a single material and that remains a single mesh after "Decompose". Almost all of the mesh breaks made by "Decompose" are places where a visible boundary is expected anyway. I don't know why I didn't think of this before. It sure seems obvious after the fact. Thanks for the help breaking my mental logjam.

Ummm, I think you'll be seeing V0.24d real soon. I reported a problem to Steve Cox, and his response was that a fix would be available shortly.

Hi Smallspace, and thanks for the hint. Yes, "Decompose into objects" would help - if there were a reverse operation that reassembled the object into a single mesh. The TS rendering engine is one of the ones that doesn't smooth across mesh boundaries, and if I break up Victoria I can see the seams in the renderings. I can deal with this problem by other means now that I know what it is. I was just sorely puzzled by the weird results until I figured out what was causing them, and I posted my message mostly in an attempt to save other people from wasting time on the same puzzle. PJF, "Decompose into objects" is what Caligari calls that tool. I'll admit it has a technoid ring to it, but it's actually a fair description of what the tool does. I think the term "ungroup" is just as much a jargon term as the longer name. Jude

I'm not argueing with the effect it's intended to create. I just think the way it was done is a kludge. I'll bet TS isn't the only rendering engine that gets confused when encountering multiple exactly coincident polygons.