** Rex and Roxie come with only one SM/Poser texture and lots of material zones.**

To rework those textures, one has to maintain the color balance between the head and body texture in your 2D application. (As for most multi map figures)

So? Off we went to the study board. LOL.

The purpose of this tutorial is the make the most out of these texture with the least amount of trouble and work in

the material room, but it takes some preparation, so here we go:

• Merge the head and body texture into one 8192x4096 texture
• Reduce the number of material zones
• Maintain or increase end user texture control

Merge the head and body texture.
We used Corel Paint Shop Pro, but any 2D paint app can do the same.( Gimp, or Photoshop)

Load both textures in your app, and merge them together in one single 8192x4096 png. (Head on the left, body on the right as in this example.)
Save this texture. Extra tip: For end quality, it helps if you sharpen the texture once.
Your texture should look something like this.

** Reduce the number of material zones.**
I used Blender for this.
Laod P10Roxie1.1 object file, and merge the material zones together to get to these 6.
6 Matarial zones is all you see in the main picture below.

- Corneas; includes both Cornea Left and Right. (To be loaded at GC 1.000)

- Eyeballs; inclused the eyebals, the iris, the pupils. (Seperate map, leaves you to choose the eye color at will. To be loaded at render GC or 2.2)

- Gums-Teeth; Includes the Gums and teeth zones as they are on a seperate map. (Seperate map: To be loaded at render GC or 2.2)

- Head/Body; includes ALL other material zones exept the mentioned here seperadly. (This is the 8192x4096 map we created above. To be loaded at render GC or 2.2)

- Lashes; Includes the top and bottom lashes. (To be loaded at GC 1.000)

- Preview

Save the object file from Blender under a new object file name.

Ok, to Poser we go.
Load Roxie.
Goto general preferences
Goto Misc
Remove the checkmark on ; Use file compression
Now save YOUR Roxie to your library under a new name.
Set your ; "Use file compression" back to where you prefer it to be. ON or OFF.
Close Poser.

Next: Open cr2editor (or any other cr2 file eitor you want to use.)

Open YOUR Roxie cr2 file you just created above.

Find the 2 lines with the path to the Roxie object file.
Change those 2 paths to point to your new object file you saved from Blender.

Go down in the file to Figure, and REMOVE ALL material zones. ALL, leave NONE.

Save the cr2 under its own new name.

Open Poser and open your newly created cr2.

Roxie will load, and Poser will "read" the material zones from the object file.
Connect the nodes and textures in the advanced material room.
Here is an example : See that I only use the diffuse texture, and use Poser to build all the rest inside the material room.
NOTICE : See the 2.000 in U_Scale. That"s how this works. LOL; That "2" is the trick.

 Save the new cr2 back to library under a new name.

To change the figure skin, from left to right, all you need is ONE adjustment on the Head/Body material.

In real time, it takes less time to do it then it did to write this down...LOL.
But afterwards, you have a dead simple material room for Roxie.

If you want to change the texture map? You only have to rework one combined Head/Body texture in your 2D app.
You can adjust Hue, saturation, colorisation, add details, or rework the texture otherwise as you like without fear of loosing the balance between the head and body texture.
And as you see from the materail room screengrab, I added a HSV node to do most of the work for you in Poser, by Poser.

For the die hards?

You can leave some material zones you think you can need afterwards, like the lips or the nails.
YOU have full control of what material zones you want to merge.

WARNING :
Prepare your work.
Prepare the folder required to store your files in, as you never-ever want to overwrite original Poser object or cr2 files.
That is why I wrote ; USE YOUR NAMES for teh new object files and cr2's.
You will need one name for the new object file.
You will need 2 names for the cr2. An intermediate one just after you made the changes in cr2editor (that you can safely delete after it use and your testing) and a final one after you connected the nodes in Poser).

Perhaps you do not need ALL what I wrote here above, so feel free to pick out the parts that fit your personal workflows.

Have fun using the Poser tools, and many happy rendering hrs to, all.
Tony

Maybe the user should not remove the preview material from the .cr2? Unless this is somehow reestablished during the new loading process (although not from the obj, as there is no preview material defined within the file)? Curious, does your new roxie have a preview material in the mat room listing?

Ok... I'm seeing that you added a preview to the .obj in blender, contrary to how most poser figure objs are set up. This material definition is usually established by the cr2 rather than the obj. Think I'm getting the way you did things here? Correct?

 A "preview" material is automatically added by Poser even if you remove it in Blender.

The object file coming out of Blender does NOT have a preview material.

When cleaning the cr2 (changing the 2 paths to your new object file name and location) you also remove **ALL materials from the cr2. ALL.
**
When loading Roxie in Poser by loading your new cr2, Poser will "read" the material zones from the onject file, add the nodes you create in the material room, and add the preview channel automatically.

Then save the cr2.
From then on, your materials are in the object file (where they have alwasy been), AND in the cr2.

Hope this helps?

"A "preview" material is automatically added by Poser even if you remove it in Blender.

The object file coming out of Blender does NOT have a preview material.

When cleaning the cr2 (changing the 2 paths to your new object file name and location) you also remove ALL materials from the cr2. ALL."

Just an experiment: take a poser figure cr2... delete all materials within that file, including preview. Now, take the referenced obj file and delete all material definitions within that file. Open poser, load that figure. What do you see?

I think this little peculiarity only occurs when you edit the actual text of the .obj/cr2 to remove the materials. Doing so in a modeler of any type will invariably define a "default" material. This is why when editing text objs and cr2s, one must be careful to leave the preview material intact within the cr2 or... poof!

Also, in order to eliminate unwanted materials within a figure via text one must delete them from both the obj and the cr2. Doing so to only one of the files causes poser to reestablish the deleted materials via whichever file was left with the intact definition. Just be careful to leave the preview material alone in the cr2 when using this method.

Nice tutorial vilters, especially your method of creating a single map.

Great tutorial, Vilters, really like this one especially as it means I'll be able to work on single skins on Poser figures in ZBrush now!

My only criticism is that I wish you'd make narrated tutorials and put them on Vimeo or YouTube cause stuff like this is a lot easier to follow that way.  I'll have to wait until I've reformatted before I try this, but I'll definitely do it, very cool tute.

 @ Pumeco

This is a Poser tutorial and it works in Poser. => The trick is the combining of the 2 textures together, and the U_Scale at 2.000 in the **Poser diffuse texture node
**
And the icing on the cake is the reduction of all the material zones to as few as practical.

You do not need this trick to work "semi single texture" in Blender or Zbrush.
You can load and paint on the textures as if the seperate textures where a single texture inside Blender, even without tips and tricks. I do it all the time.

On the contrary, you"ll probably grow a grey beard before you got this to work in Zbrush. LOL.
(And we"d be on PP2025 by then. LOL.)

it is a pure Poser material room trick that I demonstrate here.

It costs the end user about 45 minutes to build the whole set, but it saves you many-many hrs afterwards.

So it wouldn't work if I set the U to 2x in ZBrush? - It's got a setting for that but I don't know if it would work the same.

But it's actually quite easy to load a Roxie into ZBrush and start painting on her, I've been using a techinque Shane pointed out a while back, but it would definitely be much better if your trick worked in it.  ZBrush works differently to other programs, the idea is that it subdivides the model into as many polygons as you have pixels on a texture map, and you paint directly onto the polygons at whatever resolution you like.  When you've done that, you transfer the painted polygons onto the texture map so that the texture map can be saved and used in Poser etc, so it can be done quite easily, it's just different.

Still, I wish it would load-up each map simulatneously.  You have to load the head map, transfer it to the polypaint, and then do the same for the body map before you can work on it, thats the only thing that annoys me about it.

Pumeco: LOL, you are making this more complicated then it has to be, so my answer is NO an YES. LOL.

NO; I have no clue about how to set the Poser node U_Scale in Zbrush to do the same thing in Zbrush.

But YES; In Blender or Zbrush, you can subdevide the figure and sculpt the SubD version to add details.
Then, in both apps, you can "bake out", bump, or displacement or normal maps, to transfer your sculpt into maps.

Again, you"ll have a head and a body map. 2 maps to handle.

Using the trick above; Again merge both maps into a single wide map, and voila. . . one map to handle.

And if you did the merge of the material zones, far less work in Poser afterwards. 

That's what I mean, that's what I'm hoping it will do, and I think it's going to have more benefit for me inside Poser, cause like you say, it gives a single map for the skin.  I've always preferred one texture map for the complete skin so I look forward to trying it.

But if it doesn't work in ZBrush as well, I might have to send Roxie over to kick some Belgian arse :-P

 ***JOEPIE !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
The trick with U_Scale "4" WORKS !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Now have only 3 material zones left.

• Cornea
• Head/Body
• Lashes

And Poser is ultra happy lading a single 16.384 x 4096 diffuse texture.

Happy camper here.
This makes Mat room work SOOOO easy.***

 Sorry forgot to add the result so here it is.

 Here a scaled down version of the 4 merged textures into a single 16.384 x 4096 diffuse texture.

And with a single HSV node in the Matetrial room, ( as can be seen in a screengrab above ), most texture work can be done inside Poser, by Poser.
And Poser is ultra happy, and so am I.

Have fun thinking outside of the box; LOL.

Tony

** Anybody in need for Roxie- texture variations?** LOL.

All load the same single 16.384x4096 diffuse texture.
The 2 on the left get some brown added in the SSS.

 All variatons done on the single HSV node inside Poser for the combined diffuse texture.

Heyhey,, Good exploitation of the rather peculiar UV mapping of Roxie! 

Not sure about the usefulness of having the tongue, teeth and eyes in the same map, but the advantage of having head and body in the same texture map is obvious.

Allow me to cheat the magic:

Roxie's body is mapped in the (1.0, 0.0) (2.0, 1.0) region in the UV space. Poser wants to see co-ordinates in the range 0.0-1.0 and uses the modulus if the u or v co-ordinate is outside that range, so a body texture vertex (1.345, 0.678) in the .obj is translated to (0.345, 0.678) to look up the rgb values so in the standard setup Poser finds what it must find.

When applying Vilter's trick Poser considers the wide texture of course as the (0.0,0.0) to (1.0, 1.0)  UV space. The scale factor in u of 2.0 makes Poser look for rgb value (u,v) at (0.5*u, v), and so, again, find what it must find. 

In principle same trick could be played in the V-direction, having multiple skins in one texture map.

Again, Bravo! for the invention!

Yup, Tony really should be congratulated for spotting this, it's the most useful trick I've seen in years in any program.
I'm surprised more people haven't said anything, they probably don't realise what it means in real terms, but either way, congrats Tony, and well spotted :-)

Very interesting procedure ... but my concern is if you add overlays of noise, clouds ... etc. to create displacement/bump and tone variations in the figure you are suddenly dealing with dis-proportionate maps on a single zone.  I believe this may be why the maps were separated in the first place ... if I understand this properly.

... but my concern is if you add overlays of noise, clouds ... etc.

No worry.The translation is entitrely WITHIN the bitmap node. Any other nodes or mapping are not affected. You can change the scale in the cloud node without messing up the mapping of the texture, right? Then you can also tweak the scaling of the texture without messing up the cloud. 

Nope, no cloud nodes are used at all.
And no overlay either. We are Blending, not overlaying.

From the Diffuse texture, we go to a HSV node to control the Hue, Saturation and Value of the skin color. (If required) => (Here you can change the Skin Tone)

From that HSV node output, we create a B&W map in the Math_Functions to feed the Blender node that controls the Displacement.
This Blender mixes a slight Turbulence (set at 0.2 for X,Y,and Z) at a value of only 0.1 with the B&W map to create the skin Displacement set at 0.03
Feeding the Diffuse texture to Displacement this way gets you more displacement in dark area's like brows hairs, and less displacement on lighter area's.

This is augmented by the same minor Turbulence in Bump node and works +/- the same Skin imperfections as other skin procedural solutions do.

The same, but inverted trick, is used for the Alternate Specualr.
Alternate Specular is also connected to a Blender that gets its imputs from the Blinn and the Ks_microfacet (also controlled by the diffuse texture) to add some blue to the yellow skin. => Here the diffuse texture removes the Blue from the Dark area's. No Blue on the brows !

The Blinn is fed by the Diffuse texture and the small Turbulence.

Feeding the Blinn node this way, you get less specular on dark area's like the brows that do not need all that specular, and more specular on the lighter area's that do need it.
There are lots of variations possible here. 

The trick is to use the Diffuse color values to control Displacement and Specular.

=> Dark area's like brows, get MORE Displacement and LESS specular.
=> Light area's like the skin on the belly, get less Displacement but more Specular.
=> The lot "disturbed" a bit by the small Turbulense to create the Skin imperfections.

have a nice day all, and happy Posering, Tony