Quick question: If I want to apply something to skin (like a tattoo, for example), is it possible to make a trans map that loads OVER the existing skin on my Poser model? So for example I have V3 loaded; she has a hi-res skin texture applied. Now, I know I can open the skin texture in Photoshop, apply my tattoo, and resave it as a new jpg, but I don't want to do that if I can help it. Is there any way I can make a trans map of JUST the tattoo, that I can then apply to any figure, without altering the original skin texture? This would make life so much easier...

If you are using P5 you can do something similar by using the blender node.

I'm using Poser 4. On a Mac.

Only way is in P5 or using a catsuit or other skintight outfit to my knowledge

A skintight outfit with the transmap applied should work in P4. You might have to do quite a bit of adjusting to get it to sit just right on the skin..... seems easier to use Photoshop! ;)

Definatly easier in photoshop....plus in photoshop you have the ability to decrease the opacity of the leyer the tattoo is on and thus giving it more of a sub-dermal look rather than something painted on top of the skin. (one of my pet peeves about many of the tattoos I see in the marketplace.....and then there are the tattoos which are also on the bump maps causing them to be indented into the skin arrrrgghhh )LOL Rawn

Hello Rawn, it's a pleasure to hear from such a fine artist: I have several of your excellent textures. Indeed, it was your work that inspired me to try my own hand at it.:-) Wouldn't it be great if Poser 6 or 7 lets us layer textures, like you can in Photoshop? Think of the possibilities.... oh...&*%! think of the RAM!!! LOL

From the obscure fun facts Dept... Staale did some work with his "ProTex" figures that employed a second skin material. It worked similar to Vicky's Outer Eyeball material that covers the other eye mats, in that it required no additional geometry and everything else remained compatible with the original figure. He used a P4NudFem figure but the same process of duplicating the material data in the .obj? file could be done with any figure to get the same multi-layered material capability in P4. I did try it with Vicky, but just don't recall how far I got. (the figure never did end up in my library, so I assume I got sidetracked.) If you use a lot of tats, or any type of limited, local map modifications, it might be a worthwhile solution -- but you'd have to ask Staale for the details, that's about all I can recall without digging the files back out again.

Now that would be great! (There have been many times when I wanted two skin layers for the proper translucency.) So we need to tackle Staale. Hmmm... Where is his lair? Carolly

Staale's P4 figure is located at his WinScape 2001 site here: http://home.online.no/%7Ekjellil/Index-AllStuff.htm And an old thread using his figure to combine maps for a "wet" look is here (w/nudity): http://www.renderosity.com/messages.ez?ForumID=12356&Form.ShowMessage=994739 Really going beyond the limits of my memory here, (& I never was .obj file surgeon) but my recollection is that the process he employed simply involved copying a second set of each of the .obj's materials' "VT" coordinates and assigning them a new material name. -- but don't bet the house on it though. Hopefully he'll pop by here soon.

Hey RCT, thanx for the comliment, its always good to hear people like my little projects ...and even better if they can inspire someone :) Layering textures in poser sounds like an interesting possibility...though I would be afriad that with requireing several texture maps for a figure could get quite confusing....I still wrestle with trying to keep bump, transparency and reflection maps aligned for each part of each figure LOL Rawn

...in that it required no additional geometry... Ok, I downloaded Staale's example of his technique and the above statement (depending on context) is not entirely true... What he's doing is duplicating the facets (not the texture coordinates) where he wants an additional material layer. So, while it doesn't add additional vertices, it does add additional facets (polygons) that get rendered. I'm guessing that what Nance meant by "no additional geometry" is that you don't have to load some new item (like a catsuit). In general, this is a useful idea to use, but since it pretty much requires manual .obj file editing, it may also be very difficult to implement - depending on the mesh in question (it may be difficult to determine exactly which facets need to be duplicated). Depending on how Poser (and also which version of poser) is programmed internally, this may or may not require a lot of additional computation time (or even work at all) relative to rendering an 'additional geometry' figure.

Nance, I just skimmed over that other thread you linked to and... If you want to create an entire new layer(s), (as opposed to just some area of the mesh)it's actually pretty easy to do... just duplicate ALL of the 'f' lines (the facet lines), along with the intermixed 'usemtl' and 'g' lines, then go back and change the material names used in the 'usemtl' lines to something unique. No need to do anything with the 'vt' lines, unless you plan to change the values used in them (the actual texture coordinates). So basically, you copy/paste the entire section section of 'f' lines (including the 'g' and 'usemtl' lines), then edit the material names to be unique. Et voila. Cheers, - Keith

...just to clarify, you don't need to do anything with the 'v' (vertex), 'vt' (texture coordinate) or 'vn' (vertex normal) lines, just duplicate everything BELOW there (the v,vt,vn lines are normally at the top of the file).

...an additional clarification... I mentioned that this might not work at all, depending on how some particular version of Poser is programmed... what this techinque is doing is creating new polygons that are in the exact same place as the original ones. This is basically the situation you have with two-sided polygons (except that the face normals are pointing the same direction and with two-sided polygons, they face opposite directions). Since the new polygons are in the exact same 3D space as the old ones, they may or may not get rendered correctly, depending on what order the program renders them in (ie. what might work in Poser 4, might not work in Poser 5, but then again, it might ;).

Spanki - Thanks for checking it out and for the clarifications -- it had been a while and I was indeed quite foggy about it.

Nance, I've read the linked threads (verrrrry interesting, and don't see how I missed them) and downloaded Staale's figure and cube to play with. What I'm trying to get is a sparkly effect like new snow in bright sunlight. So far I've got nested Vicki2s (inner at 98%) and a temporary dress all at various stages of transparency. By messing with the highlight sizes, I should be able to get a decent inner glow. Applying the right sort of bump map to the inner figure might give me some sparkles (I don't want her to look like a small pox victim). I figure that if I can get the sparkle effect down, I can go on to mess with hair and clothing and setting and lights. But this is still so very experimental. Being able to layer textures would be a lot easier than nesting figures! Carolly

Carolly, see my post #13 above. Follow those steps on your figure, then save it as a new .obj file. Edit your .cr2 file to point to the new .obj file (change 2 references) and save it as a new .cr2 file. Load the new .cr2 file and you should have one figure with twice as many materials to play with. Neat looking render you have there so far.

I've never edited or hacked a model. This will be interesting. I have built spaceships out of code, so am not afraid of a few numbers IF I know what they are supposed to be doing. :determined grin: I do art on the Mac, so the graphics programs reside there. This Win98 box has Notepad, Wordpad and Word (and my lovely preferred version of WordPerfect 6 for DOS, but the computer hates the printer and there are driver problems). Word has wierd formatting issues. Will Wordpad be able to open and modify the file? Also, Windows boxes try to save everything as .txt even if I want a different extension... hmm... I can fix that on the Mac if it does get snitty. So, basically, I open the file, find the right section, copy it again under itself, and change material names. Nothing will happen to mess up the groups? Do the g names refer to groups, and should they also be unique so that the layers are differentiated in the render materials window? It promises to be a rainy weekend. Thank you for the kind words. If the final image is anything like what I'm holding in my head it will be worth doing. (There is a chapter in the Silmarillion where the trees of light have been killed and drained and Varda is looking out over a Middle Earth illuminated only by the background stars she'd called into being earlier. She reaches into her reserves and makes more stars for us, carefully naming and placing them. I want to show her against the sky so she needs to be somewhat transparent and even more sparkly.) Making stuff look like glass or milk is fun, but I wish that I could get it to glow properly. (The code mentioned above was DKB before it became POV - I got used to having light sources inside my translucent objects... and layering textures.) Thank you for helping dig into this. If we can get a layered effect to work with any of these models, we will have another tool. :) Carolly

Hmm... Wordpad might do it, though I'd be a little leary about that. You might want to download an eval copy of TextPad ( http://www.textpad.com/ ) or one of the other freeware/shareware editors. TextPad works great on huge files and has line-numbering display (handy). Anyway, you open the file, scroll all the way down past the 'v' and 'vt' lines and then copy everything below there and paste it back in again. Note that you'll need SOME way to determine where the newly pasted stuff starts, so you either need to take note of the line number of where it will be, or leave a big gap (a bunch of blank lines) so you can find it again after the paste... Then go to the start of the pasted section and rename every material below there. Do NOT rename the groups. You want the new polygons to be in the same groups as the original ones. Group name control how polygons bend, material names are the only thing that control which material is used in the material window. Hmmm... I just checked out the V3 .obj file and mentally walked through doing this task... because of the size of the file (and the way it's laid out) it might be tricky unless you're pretty careful. In the version I'm looking at, you'd copy everything from line 147569 (starts with "g chest") down to the bottom of the file (line 225321). Assuming that your editor lets you copy and paste that much data at once (you may need to break it up into chunks), the next problem will be the way the file is laid out... you'll see something like this at the start of the new section... g chest usemtl SkinTorso f 1894/1943 1316/2658 1293/26 1893/1939 f 1314/2450 1925/1970 1924/1971 1297/25 f 1313/1677 1314/2450 1297/25 1298/24 g neck f 1958/1 1320/1678 1299/23 1957/2004 g chest f 1948/1992 1299/23 1320/1678 1949/1994 g neck f 1967/2 1958/1 1957/2004 1968/3 f 1968/3 1300/2011 1312/1686 1967/2 ...etc. ...note that it starts with the 'chest' group for just a few lines, then switches to the 'neck' group, then back to the 'chest', etc. Again, we're not concerned with changing the group names, but it does the same thing with material names, so you will have to change multiple instances of each material name, being careful not to loop back to the top of the file and changing the original ones. If it were me doing this, I'd use my S.T.O.M.P. program to re-order the facets before doing the copy/paste... I'd sort them by material, so each material would only be listed once. This would also allow me to (easily) ONLY duplicate the materials I was interested in, instead of the entire mesh (you could leave out the fingernails, toenails, various eye materials, tongue, teeth, gums, lacrimals, lashes, brows, etc and only do the various skin materials, for example). Once you pasted the new section(s) in, you'd then only need to change ONE instance of each new material name. Anyway, all of this is speculation, based on good understanding of the .obj format, etc. But if you want to wait a bit, I'll go try some things and report back whether any of this actually works or not ;). - Keith

...ok, I tried it out first on my V3 Stockings... this particular pair is all one mesh (and all one material). I duplicated the Right leg and created a second layer as a new material. I set the original material to green and the new material to red... as you can see, there are 'polygon sorting' issues when rendering - this is what I was afraid of. Since the old and new polygons are in the same 3D space, it's really just a matter of chance (acually programming particulars) as to which polygon gets rendered 'on top'. Now, if both materials are semi-transparent, it might not matter as much (there would still be rendering artifacts), but my personal oppinion is that this method is more trouble than it's worth for the results you get. I think you're better off using multiple (scaled) meshes.... sorry.

...at any rate, if you want to pursue this method anyway, everything I said in the previous message (#20) should be accurate.

I'd be working with V2... so her facets might be better organized (not as complicated or as large a mesh). The migraine has hit hard today (I was supposed to go to a special showing of A Princess Bride this morning but cancelled). After I finish with email, I'll probably take a break before tackling this. With at least 80% translucency it might not be as critical if some facets are more sparkly than others. Of course, I'll be doing post work, too. With a commercial product, you can't expect customers to do post to cover flaws, but for something personal like this, an aberrant facet or three might not matter. (depending upon where they are, of course) The seam line at the neck is the area of concern... if using a bump map, getting the size of the noise to match will take some guesswork. Has anybody ever given a real number for the proportional difference in map sizes with the standard layout? This whole thing could probably be easier if I just dumped sugar on the scanner and slapped the resultant texture map on her, but it wouldn't have glowy depth. One of the other pictures which has been back-burnered for a while is of an undead mermaid, using Natalia, and I want a REAL pearlescent texture. If we can solve the layered look, we can get glowing depths, and use them for all sorts of special ladies. Thanks to you and Nance and Staale we might find a workable approach. Carolly

I take it that you're using Poser 4? If you're using P5, things get much easier.

Attached Link: http://www.renderosity.com/messages.ez?Form.ShowMessage=1014078

re: the snow sparkles thing; I'd tried a similar layering process on one of Pariah's models to get that very effect on the foreground snow in the image in thread above.

In this case though, I simply duplicated the entire mesh, then used the upper layer as fully transparent, with just the highlights from its bump map visible. (much easier of course with a static mesh, as opposed to a poseable figure).

Not quite On-Topic for doing your figure, but another approach to multi-layered mapping in P4.

Another good thread. I liked Movida's reindeer games. ;^) Anton was doing something neat to get sparkly eye shadow and posted his PhotoShop formula (white dissolve airbrush, fade back by half, blurred twice, and dodged onto another layer with color. I usually avoid the dissolve blending mode since it is so coarse, but over snowbanks might be a great time for it. His technique yields nice swirly sparkles... and the scanner doesn't need vacuuming afterwards. ;^) The problem is that we can do almost everything in postwork, but then we have to do it all over again if we want to reuse the figure or prop. If we can get the models to carry some of this information, they'll always be useful. I'm a perfectionist. Sometimes I run out of time and have to post an image or submit it to the publisher... but then months later I might get an opportunity to go back and try a different pose or outfit or setting. If the figure is reusable, there might also be a legal way to share the data with others so that they don't have to fight to get the look of nacre or alabaster or frost under skin. I have Vicki and Vicki2... but the objs in the Runtime say blmilWom, blMilWomLo, blMilWomLoP4, and blVickiP4. The last one is the one which gets installed with the V2 upgrade... which makes no sense unless the first one got modified, but the date doesn't indicate that. Shouldn't there be a blMilWom2 or something? I don't find a Michael2-looking file either, but he is installed and working. (DAZ needs a librarian to help them with names.) So, is the VickiP4 the file I should be hacking (does it carry the upgrade data for both V2 and V2P4?) or is there another file hidden somewhere? Thanks! Carolly

No, not vlVickiP4, you do want to remap a blMilWom.obj. Both V1 and V2 use that obj/rsr file. The diffences between V1 and V2 were the morphs that came with the V2 .cr2, which still used the same original base obj file.

OK, I'll pull that one out for renaming and mangling and the other preparations for monster creation. Thanks, Ms Frankenstein

I'm nearly a month to late, but just in case somebody does a search heres the secret:

The model in message 21 is correctly done, but you have to add layers as a pyramid, 2 added layers gives 1 working layer.

L1 copy 1
L2 (only one copy)
L1 Copy 2

The missing facets from layer 1 copy 1 will be covered by the facets in layer 1 copy 2. (99% of the time, poser 4 does not have a 100% face cover, but normally you can only see the missing ones on the edge of the model, as a black spot. If a facet is missing then rotate the affected bodypart, a small change is usually enough.)

Bad points, it slows down poser a bit, multi maps eats memory and it does not work on P5 sins it uses a bug in P4's render engine.

Staale

OK, will add that to try. I did get the file open in WordPerfect. It was horrendously long, but only had 2 types of lines f and v, IIRC. I'd thought of another way to get the effect I want but haven't tried that yet either. Got sidetracked on a couple of projects for other people (beta-testing and such) which were more immediate. This doesn't have time pressure, just something which will be really, really, really cool if we can get it to work. Thanks, Carolly