Thank you!

Thanks! It was just starting to dawn on me about the names, as I opened up ZB... sure enough ZB renamed everything just because I changed a single polygroup, so, I'm renaming groups UV Mapper again, but it's gotten easy and it's been good practice to repeat this stuff. From what you've said about the setup room, so far, it seems Poser has potential to be a pretty forgiving and straightforward software despite the occasional glitchy things. Rigging imported stuff in Poser isn't turning out to be so hard as it first came across.

Ahh, but thanks! That's something I needed to know anyway because I made a noobish mistake and didn't have the chest part running between the pecs for the front legs, or the wing shoulders, so both were creating splits in the obj, because the whole, "children can't touch" thing... That was in the tut I'm watching, I just was negligent. So, if I change the shape of a group, and import the new obj, and use the setup room like you just described, to "transfer" my figure rig to this new obj... there probably won't be any issues? As long as the number of bones doesn't need to change or anything?

Okay, just reimported the obj, phi file, fixed the bones, saved the figure, and the "foot glitch" did not repeat it'self. I'll post back with another update when this thing starts to actually look pretty lol.

Okay, got pretty far, noticing a weird problem suddenly though. I welded the seams in UV Mapper just to be safe, and checked things over, after importing the obj and the PHI heirarchy file, and it was all fine, I moved bones in the setup room, saved over my figure, and now, randomly, some polygons no longer seem to be connected on one of the feet... Is there a quick and easy way to keep the bones I have, and bring in a fixed version of the obj? : /

Caveat, I haven't gotten past the part in the tutorial series by Darkedge where he's assigning joint rotations to all the body parts. So maybe he covers how to fix something like this.

Here's some progress images.

Checking my UV map. - a little stretching at the shoulders, I know I could have separated this into a few more parts, but good enough for my purposes, since I'm going to do a lot of digital painting over the renders.

The bones after importing from PHI.

Bones after touch-up. Turned out pretty good, I think. ..I know the hind toe was still messed up there. ;p

Broken foot1

Broken foot 2 - maybe the seams aren't what's broken... I hope the bone can be fixed? Guess I can just start over but I hope I don't keep re-living this glitch.

Yeah. Didn't like how much empty space there was when I made the body map. Fortunately this is for personal use and my comp can take it for now, but I definitely need to keep improving my UV maps. Ok. Thanks a lot! I will update pretty soon.

Oh ok, I think I understand. You were saying that if I wanted to change the arrangement, it would require going back up the pipeline into ZB and making all new maps. I suppose that's not a bogus idea or anything, I'm just thinking in such linear terms right now. I do know ZB is powerful when it comes to projection, and such. Used it only for projecting detail after retoping so many times.. "Import mat as groups" sounds brilliant! Didn't even know it could do that. Seeing how UV Mapper and ZB can work together.

Thanks for the explanation and the tut!!

For the time being, I'll just go with the unwraps/maps I got from each tool, see how they work. Seems organized enough for this model, but good to know I can go back and forth and make things look just right.

So if my dragon's body tool UV settings were at 8k res, will it import the maps to Poser that size?

My thinking to just assign materials based on my current ZB textures should just work straightforwardly then?

kerwin posted at 8:11AM Tue, 05 January 2016 - #4247259

You should not have overlapping UV islands in the same material.

Right, I figured that. I wish I knew the terminology so I could pose my questions better. I already UV'd my model in ZBrush, right? I exported the unwraps from each tool, creating textures and bump-maps from my polypaint and HD subdivisions. I just wondered if I should create my material groups in UV Mapper based off the maps I exported from ZBrush.

What's confusing me is I already have my textures out of ZBrush, and mixing and matching UV's contrary to how they are arranged in the BMP files I exported doesn't really make sense to me. Why would I do that and can I even do it?

The body has a texture I exported from ZB has a resolution of about 8k. The eyes about 2k, and the rest 1k.

I follow that people would want nicely detailed eyes. In my case, I'll be doing over those by hand in PS, because they are just color changing compound orbs. The body mattered the most, since I wanted to preserve skin-wrinkles and little details that would be a pain to paint.

Ugh, meant to point out those ugly things are the claw textures lol. The claws were all one tool, I exported the textures from them. So should my materials in UV Mapper be based on the textures I exported from ZBrush? Like the two halves of the body map just be assigned to "body". So I can just import the textures into poser?

Too noisy in my house to watch a tut, and since my model doesn't have the same UV as the Poser models to take reference from I'm just in here trying to get a better idea of the guidelines for how to handle UVs.

Thanks guys! :)

Oke, so you are saying it's not super important whether I UV before, or after rigging... it depends on if I'll want to go back and change the sculpt based on how the rigging goes. I probably won't, but mainly, I just want to see if I can get this thing to appear in Poser with materials so I can say I've figured out that part. :D

Since I already have the UV's there, anyway right? Just not sure I know what to do next here in UV Mapper before going into PHI again.

Before Merge.

After Merge

How to assign materials?

Reading this tutorial and in general trying to understand the idea of UV's better, since, with both the obj and the textures, I have put the cart before the horse and started modeling without really educating myself about these things.

Nice model, Eldritch, saw that in your gallery earlier, and was taken with the traditional art too. Always refreshing to see that stuff. That's an honorable goal, to share with the community. Not sure what the real scope of my goals are at this time. The heart of it is, I want to produce a fan-comic with the dragon, and make a bunch more models for an original story. Also models to aid in commission illustration. Personal stuff for now. As for what DarkEdge said about forum communication - I have some anxieties about them for the exact same personal reasons lol. I appreciate that everyone here has been so cool and can't state enough how thankful I am that you guys have been focused on helping me get a grasp on this and that you've stuck around this long.

@ Kerwin: That's awesome. I've always enjoyed tutoring as much as being tutored... not professionally or anything tho. Just other aspects of art I've been approached about. Do you have rates listed anywhere or a site portal? I was a 4.8 GPA student in college, but took a break to focus on a skill-developing path that fit more the direction I want to go in the immediate future. My ultimate goal isn't to work in a big studio anyway so the diploma can wait a bit. One of the promises I made to myself was that I'd keep learning and get into some mini courses that focus on what I presently need to know.

DarkEdge posted at 11:39PM Sat, 02 January 2016 - #4246953

I just finished rigging a WWII Corsair, it has 50 bones in total for all of the flaps, elevators, joystick, etc. Hierarchy was a bitch but through good naming techniques and PHI I was able to pull it together. Again, everyone/anyone should use what works for them! :)

Glad to hear you're keeping busy with your art DarkEdge. :D I don't think I've seen your newest stuff.

I'm seeing that, about it being more important what works for the artist, I mean the end result is what really matters. I just came in here not really even knowing what a .obj even is... lol. You've all improved my understanding drastically. Anyway, I'm starting to see the tip of the iceberg, as far as the universal language of the. That makes me less anxious about compatibility and pipeline than I was starting off.

********Okay, so I started over and I just have a question now that I'm in UV Mapper again. Should I do more, while naming the VU's and groups, to ensure that my textures can load in into Poser? Here's what's got me confused: ********

My tools were all separated when I first exported the objs and UVs that had the original vertice ordering - assuming that merging all those tools into one and keeping the UVs did reorder things... I'm just assuming that's possible, if not likely... So, how do I get the .psd textures I exported ...on... the UV's all stacked up in UV Mapper? And the bump maps I made. Maybe I should get further with the tutorials now that I'm over the grouping hump to see if there's a demonstration in there. But it doesn't hurt to ask now.

DarkEdge posted at 8:32AM Sat, 02 January 2016 - #4246888

I tend to name my Groupings and Materials inside of my modeling program. The only thing I use UVMapper for anymore is to add a Grouping and/or Material to an existing obj file.

Yeah, that was the only step in the series that threw me off, and that's not criticism or anything, I just didn't know what program I should use myself, or if I could go ahead and make groups in ZB without adding any more programs to the pipeline... for me it's easier (cheaper) to just use UV Mapper or something free. The main reason I came here was to figure out the simplest way to name groups and without spending money.

...And I can report that I was able to follow the rest of your monster rigging tutorial and actually got this dragon into Poser with body parts! Woo!!! PHI builder was a breeze to use. Fortunately I'm a neat-freak with names in general, so my hierarchies didn't need too much cleaning actually.

I don't think my obj was perfectly centered, though, since the weights aren't symmetrical. I'm going to see if I can fix and start over in PHI. Not sure what happened there.

I screenshotted what I mean. I feel like a dork!

Oh ok, watching the tutorial again, I was reminded that PHI is using the way the parts are named to organize them. Makes sense. Well my names aren't terribly allover the place.