Hi, I've been trying to figure this one out but I'm stumped. I have a mesh I made in Amapi; I've imported it into Carrara, attached bones and applied a procedural texture (cellular color, highlight, reflection, etc.) When I animate the figure, I would like the texture move relative to the polygons, so that it looks like real skin. Instead, it seems to stay put relative to the universe, so that the texture crawls over the skin of the figure. I've tried both "interpolated" and "Keep current value" on the UV mapping properties, without any apparent difference. I'm using procedural shaders 'cause I hate UV mapping; can I make this work, or is my approach fundimentally flawed. Any assistance would be appreciated! Thanks!

Dave,

Bones actually change the object's local coordinates so procedural textures, like Marble, cellular, etc. will move with the bones. The trick is to change those procedural shaders into UV based textures. Generally the procedure is to set up a good set of UV coordinates in your mesh. You might need to do an export to something like UV Mapper or Mapping Magician to get it the way you want. Next step is bring it back into Carrara, apply your procedural shaders, and then export to OBJ with the Convert Procedural shaders to textures option turned on. It will probably take a long time (I've had some take over night), but when your done you've got some nice texture maps that will look like your procedurals, render much faster, and work with bones. There are a lot of tutorials out there geared towards building Poser figures that can get you going down the right path.

Good luck,
Eric Winemiller
Digital Carvers Guild
3D extensions for Carrara
http://digitalcarversguild.com

Eric Winemiller
Digital Carvers Guild
Carrara and LightWave plug-ins

Thanks for the information -- I was hoping to avoid UV mapper -- but I guess I'll have to bite the bullet and give it a go.