I'm trying out a demo version of bodypaint and want to play.  however, there doesn't seem to be many tuts out there relevant to using BP and Poser - I want to use it to do my textures.  Does anyone know of any links to idiot proof tutorials

thanx

Sheila

I bought the KURV CD and the Seams Magic tutorial here at RMP, and found both of them helpful. However (some qualification here) there are no tutorials that I could find online or anywhere else which deal specifically with making photoreal textures for Poser characters, which is my main interest. Most of the tutorials I've seen are about just painting on objects and using the Painting Wizard, for simple painted on textures. I'd like to see more tutorials on photoreal texturing.

thanks Stephanie.  I too like to work with photoreal textures (lucky for me I have friends and family who will let me take their pictures!  I can make the texture maps OK, but just want to make matching seams a bit easier.  I think I will try by doing it - that's the best way to learn I think

Sheila x

You must understand that BodyPaint is a 3D UV mapper (for the most part).  Photographic texturing is a 2D process (read: Photoshop or PaintShop Pro).  You will want to use BP to set up the UV mapping - but then you'll need to use the 'template' of that in Photoshop to make the 2D texture from the photographic references.

There are several ways to create the 'template' of the UV polygons.  One of them is mentioned in the Cinema 4D forum FAQ (Cartesius, the god) and another would be to export as Wavefront OBJ and load into UVMapper, saving the template as BMP.  In Photoshop, you use the template as a background layer.  I'll be direct here and say that 'flattening' photographs over a 2D UV template requires some skill.  There are tutorials for sale here by BTSculptor that may come in handy.  Also, the book "[digital] Texturing & Painting" is a highly recommended resource.

Robert

thanks for the help.  I generally do textures in photoshop and will continue to do so.  bodypaint is just another toy for me to try

Sheila

I found these through Google (not sure if you've already seen any of them):

http://www.psionic.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk/c4dtuts/bpgun01.html
http://www.creativecow.net/articles/labelle_jannis/texturing/index.html
http://www.tutorialized.com/tutorial/First-Steps-in-BodyPaint-3D/7871
http://www.tutorialized.com/tutorial/Multi-Channel-Painting-in-BodyPaint-3D/9181

Thanks for the links R_Hatch, I had bookmarked these in earlier searches. There seems to be quite a bit out there on painting but not on using photos. Mainly I am using Photoshop to make the textures and got BP to get rid of seams. However, when I clone over seams the "paint" doesn't seem to stay on the seams, it goes elsewhere on the texture. That's the kind of information I'm trying to find but I'm not having much luck.

http://www.3dtotal.com/team/tutorials/astil_afro/astil_afro_01.asp

I found this one. Not incredibly detailed, but since it's written for a different program, that's a good thing. It does give some good guidelines about general workflow for creating a texturemap from photos. There is/was another tutorial floating around, but I didn't bookmark it :(

This one helped me when I tried Bodypaint, and falled in love with the program -so now I'm saving money.

http://www.perpetualvisions.com/articles-and-graphics/tutorial-bodypaint-poser.htm

Love Jenny

thank you!  This goes some way towards what I was looking for.  I make the textures using photos - all I need is to fix seams (always a headache!).  Will try this tut and see what it comes up with.

Sheila