Nice..very nice :)

Nice work, particularly on the catsuits. I've never been satisfied with my own attempts at transmapping. The edges are always too jaggy.

I made a fox character recently, myself, although it was based on Mia, rather than Lemurtek's figures.

Ryan Fox Speaks (MPEG format, 2.73MB)

This video served as an object lesson in why Ryan Fox (a fellow 3D artist and animator) should never leave a voice recording lying around where a Poser user with a copy of Mimic can get hold of it ....

giggles That video looks so good..too bad I couldn't hear what he was saying :)

As for the transmaps, start with a really huge template, a much bigger image of the mesh than you'd ever use for a texture. How big they need to be for the render, it depends. In discussion else-net, they've been described as over-dressed. Could be worse; have you ever tried disentangling fishnet stockings from your fur?

I can truthfully say no.

Tiffany Tiger of Suburban Jungle fame once made a similar comment concerning chainmail bikinis.

Was Cerebus the Aardvark the first to do the chainmail bikini joke?

Message edited on: 06/06/2004 02:14

I wouldn't know. I haven't read the comic. Has Sim finally reached issue 300?

I recall hearing that he'd reached his announced last-issue number, a while back. Was that #300?

I did the transparency maps. and the texture for the catsuit, in an oldish version of Paintshop Pro, starting with a large export of the texture template from UVmapper. Make sure the mesh is not in a colour you plan to use, so it can be easily distinguished and selectively erased. It's also worth adding index marks for the front and back centreline of the body.

You might also want to put some marker dots outside the mesh as a guide to key points. Colour is useful, even if you put all this on extra layers.

I then did the transparency map. Start with the boundaries. I used the line tool. several pixels wide, and removed less rather then more, flood-filling with black. And there was a lot of flicking between PSP and Poser, to judge just where the boundaries were on a 3D figure.

The lacing was added later, by drawing white lines.

In retrospect, it may have been better to make two layers containing the mesh template. The second would be the working layer. Convert to coloured mesh, flood-fill outside with black, and then colour-replace the mesh to white. But I'm not up to speed on using layers, and saving in a Poser-usable format could be awkward.

It is definitely better to work on a very large original, and reduce the final size to suit, but keep in mind how wide the lacing would be on the final transparency or texture. It's a bit of a waste to draw a 4-pixel line on a 4096x4096 master copy if your working copy is going to be 512x512.

Remember to check out fonts such as Wingdings for useful symbols. If your paint program doesn't let you rotate fonts, put it in a scratch image, rotate that, and cut-and-paste.

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