I'm working on a Halloween-themed character pack for V3.  It'll include textures and morphs for a Good Witch, Evil Witch, Werewolf, Elf/Fairy, Ogre/Troll, and Vampire.  I've run into a little hitch with the Werewolf texture.

As you can see, there's an awful seam where the head meets the neck, and the body texture isn't nearly as sharp as the head texture.  I'm using the exact same fur pattern on both, so I can't figure out what's going on here.  Can anyone please give me some tips or something?

I think the problem is that, although the textures are at the same resolution - 4000 x 4000, for example - the body covers a lot more area than the head. As a result, the pattern is going to be stretched more, and give you an uneven result.

So that's what's causing the problem. Unofrtunately, as I'm not a texturer, I cant' tell you the solution. :(

jonthecelt

Yes, that's the likely cause. On the head map, the neck is nearly the full width of the texturemap, while it's tiny on the body map. I did a quick check on some DAZ textures, and the head was about 720 pixels while the body was 150. What you need to do is start with templates, either direct from a ultility such as UVmapper or using one of Snowsultan's seam guides. Use them as layers in Photoshop, Paintshop Pro, the Gimp, or whatever you chose to use. And one thing you can do is take the neck area of the body texture, and transfer it to the head texture, re-scaling and positioning it as a layer that matches the neck-edge on the head. You'll still have a problem with differing resolutions, but if you're using Poser 5 and later there's even a fix for that. You can make a large, high-res texture for the neck and upper-chest area of the figure, and use the scale and offset settings on the image-map node to position that in the UV-space for the body. You could also make something a little like a transparency map. You'd then use a Blender node to mix the normal full-body map with the neck-area hi-res map, controlled by that transparency map. Now, I'm guessing a little here, but UV-space seems to have 16-bit resolution, while there's a 12-bit limit to the dimensions of a bitmap loaded into Poser. so a 4000-pixel body-map has about 400 pizels for the neck-width, while a 4000-pixel head-map runs about 3800. To be honest, a 4000-pixel head seems a bit large for most jobs. A 2000-pixel head combined with a 4000-pixel upper-body patch could look pretty good. Now, I haven't tried this specific trick, though I've used the scale/offset method for a lot of stuff, such as lips and logos on tshirts. Poser 6 lets you use an alphachannel, rather than a sperate control texturemap (and I'm not sure if P5 does that or not). And I'm not good with hair or fur. But the process should work. So let me know how it comes out.

Quote - I did a quick check on some DAZ textures, and the head was about 720 pixels while the body was 150.

Are those lengths or widths?

Unfortunately, I'm completely clueless with nodes.  I have never used the Advanced view in the Material Room.  I have tried resizing the textures and changing the resolutions.  So far, no improvement.

Widths. The texturemaps wrap around, and there may be more complications at the back of the neck, because of the arms. As for the node stuff, yes, it is complicated. Like any powerful too.

Here's an image showing how the texturemapping along the body/head boundary fits. They use the Tiles node in Poser 5, applied the Skinhead, Skinneck, and Skintorso. The top two images use the same tile size settings for all the materials, giving the same result as a square grid on a square texturemap. As you can see, one square covers a much bigger area on the body. The bottom two images have the tiling on the body at one fifth the size of that applied to the head. The differences are much smaller, and you can now see how the texturemap is stretched over the shoulders and the effect of the seams at the back of the neck. Incidentally, you can also see how the square pattern is stretched to fit over the face.

I'm using Poser 6.  Where do I find the Tiles node, or does one exist?

Materials room, in the 2D textures section of the NewNode pop-up menu. Unfortunately, the joint between head and body is very awkward, when I too a close look. It's not just the different scale, the difference isn't consistent. So if you match at the centre-front the mesh goes out of alignment as you move around. So it looks like my idea aren't going to be practical with the DAZ figures. At least, not unless you take a lot of trouble to correct for the distortions. Luckily, Max Blackrabbit gives Zig-Zag white neck-fur.