I rarely ever see GIFs used for texture or transparency maps. But for certain types of texturing, they seem to make more sense than JPGs, since 8-bit images seem to relieve a little of the processing and memory load for Poser. GIFs work fine with the Mac, but it seems I remember hearing that certain image formats don't work equally across platforms. GIF images would be perfect for grayscale tranparency maps and texture maps that are designed for spot color work (3 or 4 different basic colors with some gradient colors for anti-aliasing).

GIFs only support 256K colors so they would only be good for transparancies not textures (unless you were only working with 256K colors) Other than that GIFs are only good for web animations (but Flash does it better ;-)

Attached Link: http://www.pcworld.com/news/article.asp?aid=13651

Not to mention that the Unisys patent can cost you $5000 for the LZW licesnse to use the GIF format... Good thing the patent expires in 2003. Just thought I'd share this. However I prefer maximum quality Jpegs or bitmaps.

igohigh Cute! LOL!

Fire--folks using programs that have licenced this technology don't have to worry about this particular problem (Photoshop users need not be alarmed). This has been more of a concern with freeware and shareware developers who create image programs who have not licenced that particular image format. I'm assuming that Metacreations licenced that particular technology for Poser--so we should be safe. One web design trick to compressing the size of a JPEG is to blur the image before saving it. This is because JPEG is most efficient with gradual shifts in color, not contrasts. The 8-bit image is best for grayscale, or for a texture that only represents a few colors (like a simple color logo). The thing I don't like about JPEG for flat color fields and grayscale is that you will still suffer some generational loss if you need to change a JPEG copy of the original, and that it saves 256 or a 32 color images as if they actually contained millions of colors, and then the program reading the JPEG will be forced to process the image as if it had millions of colors as well. I prefer PICT image files over bitmaps and GIFs--the PICT format seems to handle a wider range of color depth much more effectively than the BMP. There's usually a huge difference in the resulting file sizes and PICT compression is lossless. The reason I'm asking about the GIF format is that it seems the most cross platform friendly way to share texture maps that only require a few colors.

Good thing for pointing that out Freakachu, I forgot to mention that. Thanks for clarifiying. I'm pretty sure that Metacreations has a license and that we're "special" ;) PICT... Hmmm... I need to check it out. I think PNG's would be pretty good too.

Speaking of PNGs gives me an idea for the Poser 5 wishlist... Since there are several formats that can carry alpha channels (as well as other channels) why is it that we have to ask Poser to reference 3 seperate maps (two of which carry grayscale information) when it should be completely possible to reference a texture map that is carrying bump and transparency information in two additional channels. Granted, JPEG couldn't do it, but PNG would be a perfect way to carry all three maps in one file--reducing the clutter of most texture libraries by at least half. Think about it--one obj file, one cr2 or pp2 file (and it looks like CL is finally doing something about the rsr files--although getting rid of them completely by combining them with the CR2, PP2, PZ2, and related files would be the best move), along with one all purpose texture file.

Attached Link: http://www.freshmeat.net

For those of you that use linux you can also get a gif library, (libungif I think) that allows you to use gifs without worrying about the patent, as this implementaion doesn't use the algorithm... You'll find it on freshmeat