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Creating a Bitmap Texture for V3 Morphing Fantasy Dress.

• You will need Poser
• A paint program (I will be using PSP7)
• V3 Morphing Fantasy Dress (V3MFD) from DAZ
• and the Seam guide, by Snow Sultan, (scroll down to the bottom of the DAZ Page
• and (optional) The V3 template - Also at the bottom of the DAZ V3MFD Page
• There are two ways of creating a texture in P5/P6 - "procedural" or Bitmap
• we will be using bitmaps for this tut.
• This is just the basic principals.

 

Open up Poser and load in a decent lighting setup - You can't see what you are doing in the dark. Load the V3 MFD and change all the material zones difuse colour to white (in the material room) and Transparency to 0% This stops any default colours/transaparencies influencing our texture

Save the Poser file in case you want to use it latter for another project

Open up the template in you paint program (A lot of DAZ products have templates) and have a look at it. The clear white part doesn't show up on your model. It basically show just the different material zones are, however doesn't show the seams very well. Or they can be created with othe prgrams like UV Mapper

Here I have applied the template to the V3MFD Just to show what it looks like on the dress. (composite pic)

Lets open and have a look at the Seam Guide in our paint program They are excellent and Snow Sultan sometimes makes them available as Renderosity Freebies. Here is the V3MFD with the Seam Guide applied

And a close up: This Seam Guide is 3500x3500 - The larger Bitmaps allow more detail but use more resources.

In PSP save your Seamguide as a PSP file as we will be working with layers. Layers are your best friend Poser can't read PSP however it can read lots of other formats (I use .jpg when testing with a figure)

Now in PSP create a texture to apply to our seam guide I created a new document 512x512 and filled it with a leather colour Then applied a fine leather texture from PSP effects Menu Then saved the file for latter use as "Leather1.psp"

Save your "Red Leather" pic, howver keep it open.

Load in your backup V3 Seam Guide. Create a new Raster Layer This is the easy way normally you paint your texture onto the seam guide however.... Flood fill the newly crated layer with the leather pattern you have created. Save your work in PSP format

Reduce the transparency of the lower layer (s) so you can see your template Create a new Layer Create a design on your new layer Save your work in PSP format. Before exporting the pic for user in Poser remember to restore layer transparency.

Here is a quick render With our new texture on all material zones of the dress

Transparency Maps These are textures where Black is transparent and white is opaque Used in the Material room with the transparencey adjustment it allow objects to be transparent. Load a copy of your seam guide. We will create a dress by only using the transparency map. Create a new layer and fill it with white. Reduce the transparency of the white layer so we can see our guide Select an area at the front of the dress to just below the crotch (Mid yellow on seam) Fill the selection with a gradient (Light to dark) Promote the selection to a layer Save your work Back on the white layer do the same for the bootom of the back of the dress - Just remember to invert the gradient. Save your work Restore all layer transparencies. Export the pic for loading into Poser

Back in Poser, load in the white dress We now have two bitmaps maps to place on it (all material zones). The coloured one goes in the Difuse Colour Box The Transparency (Black and white) goes into the Tansparency box

Here's what it looks like when rendered. Composited in PSP

Textures, when finalised should be placed in your ... Runtime/Textures directory. Apply the textures from your runtime/textures directory. This should be done before creating a Mat or saving your dress with the textures applied. This means Poser will be able to find the maps after you have deleted all your working files.

Feedback on this tut would be appreciated. Thanks for looking. Richard