Forum: Poser 11 / Poser Pro 11 OFFICIAL Technical

Subject: How do YOU connect the various image maps when importing an OBJ

3dcheapskate opened this issue on Jan 26, 2021 ยท 19 posts

3dcheapskate posted Tue, 26 January 2021 at 12:30 AM

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Many of the OBJ models I've gdownloaded have four or more image maps associated with them. Often there's no associated MTL file, or the MTL file only mentions one or two of the maps.

In my experience even when there's an MTL file Poser only seems to load and connect the diffuse/texture map when importing an OBJ.

So I usually end up manually connected the maps. But I'm probably not connecting them in the best way.

The four most common types of map I've come across are:

  1. Diffuse/texture maps (colour) - the basic colour map of the object. Connects to Diffuse_Colour

  2. Height/displacement maps (greyscale) - in Poser terminology 'bump' would fit here too. Connects to Bump or Displacement

  3. Normal maps (colour) - all the ones I've seen are tangent-space, with the mainly bluish tone. Connects to Gradient_Bump, with Gradient_Mode set to Tangent Space Normal Map

  4. Specular maps (greyscale) - Connects to Specular_Value

Sometimes there are a different set of maps, or additional maps - here are a few that I can remember seeing:

  1. Albedo - these images appear to be the same as diffuse/texture maps, so I use them in the same way.

  2. AO maps (greyscale) - ambient occlusion. Not sure how these should be used. I sometimes connect them to Bump, and sometimes invert them and connect them to Diffuse_Value (and Specular_Value)

  3. Roughness (greyscale) - a PBR thing? I sometimes connect them to Bump and Highlight_Size with some intermediate nodes

  4. I know that there are other maps but I can't recall any off-hand. Let me know if you think of any of them.

So my main question is this - how do you people connect up the various maps to the Poser_Surface node ?

(Note: I'm using Poser 11 Firefly, but if you use Superfly I'd be happy to see responses for that too)

My second question concerns the Gamma values you set when you select an Image_Source. I know (?) that greyscale maps should generally have gamma = 1.0, and colour images generally use gamma = 2.2 with one exception (I think) normal maps should use gamma = 1.0. Am I correct ?

The 3Dcheapskate* occasionally posts sensible stuff. Usually by accident.
And it usually uses Poser 11, with units set to inches. Except when it's using Poser 6 or PP2014, or when its units are set to PNU.

*also available in ShareCG, DAZ, and HiveWire3D flavours (the DeviantArt and CGBytes flavour have been discontinued).