Applying figure textures in P5 - a tutorial

wdupre

OK so you want to make a pinup picture of Judy, perhaps a bikini shot at the beach, maybe in the sunset even. You have morphed Judy the way you like her, you picked the hair (AprilYSH’s Jocosa hair) you got a cool sunset backdrop (courtesy of Schlabber).
But the stock Judy texture is just too pale. What to do?
Hay you’ve heard that Judy can take Vicky’s textures! (And Don can take Mike’s)
But how to get the texture on Judy? Glad you asked

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Will Duprï¿½

wdupre · Posted: Sun Dec 15, 2002 1:25 pm Post subject:

First you have to go into the Material Room (1) then you have to pick out the body of the figure. You can do this two ways the first is by hovering your cursor over the object that you want to work on, and click your left mouse button. Or the second, which we will do here, is by going to the object list (2) and selecting your figure (in this case figure 1) then selecting the first material (3) that you want to modify. Your material Window should now look like the picture below, your Root Node on the left and another node attached to it via two pale blue cords. Now you could go into the second node, which is a 2D Image map node and just change the textures, and then go through every material in the list and do the same, but then you wouldn’t learn anything about nodes so I am going to delete that 2D Image map node. Click on the header for the image map node. It will turn gold. Then hit delete. It’s gone.
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Will Duprï¿½

wdupre · Posted: Sun Dec 15, 2002 1:27 pm Post subject:

OK now you are going to create a new image map node. Up in the right hand corner (Arrow) you’ll find the words Node Options and a small black arrow. click on the arrow, now hover your curser over the words New node, then 2D Textures, and click on image_map. You have now created a new image map node.
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Will Duprï¿½

wdupre · Posted: Sun Dec 15, 2002 1:28 pm Post subject:

Next you want to connect the image map node to your root node. If you’ll notice all along the right edge of the root node are a series of tiny outlets (4). And on the upper corner of each shader node is a plug (5) with your mouse left click on top of the Plug and drag and release it over the outlet next to the Diffuse color (4) notice a cord now attaches the two nodes. Go back to the plug again and this time drag the cord over to the outlet beside the Specular color. You have now attached the image map to the Skin body surface but there is nothing loaded into the image map. That’s next. You will note that there are a whole lot of other settings with their own outlets. For the purpose of this demonstration we will ignore those settings.
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Will Duprï¿½

wdupre · Posted: Sun Dec 15, 2002 1:31 pm Post subject:

Directly below the image map title you will see a line that reads Image_Source and next to that in white is the word None, click on None. Now a tan window will come up it will say Choose a texture for ‘Image_map:Image_source’, below that is an arrow next to the word None. Click on the Browse button (6) below the word None.
For the purpose of this demonstration I am using Dark Whispers Tamsin texture (from his Summer of 76 collection.) hopefully you are familiar enough with directory structures to navigate to your chosen texture.
In my case the texture I am looking for is at C/Program Files/Curious labs/Poser 5/Runtime/textures/Dark Whisper, yours will likely be in a different folder within the Textures folder. My file is called TamsinBodyTex.jpg click on your file and then open (7). Now listed above the Browse button should be your texture. Click on OK (

. Now instead of a white ball at the bottom of the root node your texture should be there.
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Will Duprï¿½

wdupre · Posted: Sun Dec 15, 2002 1:33 pm Post subject:

Now would be a good time to save your texture into a new P5 materials Library. Your materials library should already be open. Use the up folder icon (9) to get to the top material library it will say Materials (10) if it doesn’t and you see a P5 and a downloads folder you have gone to far. Double click on the P5 library to get back to Materials (10) next click on the little arrow (11) next to Materials. At the bottom of the list is add new category click on that. A small window will open up and you will type in the name for your new category. in my example it is My Textures. Now that you have a place to put all your new textures it is time to add the current body texture to your library by clicking the small + (12) at the bottom of the library pallet. A window will come up and you can name your new texture, click OK. Next you are going to change all of the textures on your figure, which are on your new body map. For Judy they are Skinbody, tongue, inner mouth, teeth, nipples, fingernails, and toenails. Change all these by finding them in the list in the Material menu (13) and double clicking on your new body Material in your library.
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Will Duprï¿½

wdupre · Posted: Sun Dec 15, 2002 1:34 pm Post subject:

Now you must take the same steps as you did with the body and repeat them with the head, loading skinhead from your materials menu at the top of the mat window (14), loading your chosen head texture into the image map node (15) (it will be in the same folder where you found the body map and likely will be named identical save for head instead of body. In my case it’s TamsinHeadTex.jpg) Connecting the node and saving it to the library. The mats that have to be changed for the head are Lacrimal, (tear ducts) lips, skinhead, and nostrils.
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Will Duprï¿½

wdupre · Posted: Sun Dec 15, 2002 1:35 pm Post subject:

Now you may note that there are a whole bunch of other materials on the list. And those of you with experience with Vicky might say what about the eyes, they’re on the head map aren’t they, the answer for Judy and Don is Nope. the P5 figures have their own separate Eye maps with many different layers but we won’t bother going into them here, that’s a subject for another tutorial all of it’s own. But while we are on the eyes and in the material room perhaps we might do something to put a little sparkle in Judy’s eyes. We’re going to use what’s called an anisotropic shader node, which has the property of creating irregular shaped highlights on reflective objects, and since Judy’s eyes are pretty flat now this will be just the ticket.
For this example rather then create the node from the top of the window and attaching it to the outlet we are going to create it ready attached. First you are going to open the eyeball material. Then search down until you find the Reflection color property. Click on the outlet by the property (16) and you will see two options the first is disconnect and since there is nothing connected this option is grayed out. The second option is New Node click on this then hover over lighting, then specular, click on anisotropic (17).
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Will Duprï¿½

wdupre · Posted: Sun Dec 15, 2002 1:36 pm Post subject:

As you see the new node came ready attached to the reflection color and if you compare, the shader has sharpened the highlights in the window and look ho much glossier her eyes look. You could also do the same thing with the Lacrimals (tear ducts. Thanks Kiera for that tip.)
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Will Duprï¿½

wdupre · Posted: Sun Dec 15, 2002 1:40 pm Post subject:

While we are at it this is supposed to be a beach shot so perhaps Judy should have a little shine, from the days suntan lotion applied vigorously hours earlier by a very lucky cabana boy. Lets go back to the skin body material and add a Specular node (the same way you added the anisotropic node to the eyeballs) but we cant leave the node at those levels otherwise she’ll look like she went swimming in oil. Go ahead and turn down the Specular_value (1

to 0.3000 and the Roughness (19) down to 0.02000 repeat this process to the Skinhead, the lips, and the nails since the nipples don’t show in this image it is not necessary to do those.
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Will Duprï¿½

wdupre · Posted: Sun Dec 15, 2002 1:41 pm Post subject:

Ok now you are ready to add props, background image, poses, and lighting to the image. You might want to save it back into the figure library first though so you can use your character in other scenes.
Thank you for reading my Tutorial I hope it helps to make your Poser 5 experiences a little better.
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Will Duprï¿½

wdupre · Posted: Sun Dec 22, 2002 9:33 am Post subject:

Part 2
BUMP MAPS
For this section I am going to use Vicky 3 and her High Res maps (Dark Whispers characters do not come with their own bump maps)
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Will Duprï¿½

wdupre · Posted: Sun Dec 22, 2002 9:34 am Post subject:

Bump maps for Figures are used to enhance a skin texture by simulating pores, creases, wrinkles, scars, and other subtle details that can be picked up by lighting but are too minute for the basic mesh to create. Bump maps come as basic grayscale images in the form of bitmap or Jpeg images. In poser 4 these images had to be converted to Bum files in order to be usable. But with Propack and now P5 the original image can be used Unconverted. Not all textures have accompanying bump maps but many do. Just like the basic texture map there will be a head bump and a body bump map.
In the P5 mat room there are three places that a bump map can be plugged in Bump (1), Displacement (2), and Gradient_bump (3). Mat pose files will generally plug the Bump map into the Gradient_Bump outlet as shown, or leave it floating unplugged. The node used for bump maps is the same as any texture, a 2D image map node.
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Will Duprï¿½

wdupre · Posted: Sun Dec 22, 2002 9:36 am Post subject:

Here is an example of a close-up of Vicky 3’s face with the bump texture connected to the Gradient_bump Value.
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Will Duprï¿½

wdupre · Posted: Sun Dec 22, 2002 9:39 am Post subject:

With P5 a more powerful version of bump mapping is available to the user, and that is the displacement map. Displacement mapping is different then the standard bump mapping in that Displacement actually performs minute deformations of the mesh itself. Enabling far more definition in the modeled surface.
So this is what we are going to use. If you are not using a mat pose file the bump map has not been loaded and you can refer back to the section on loading a texture map but this time you will connect the node to the Displacement outlet (4) and load your bump jpeg (5). If your map was loaded with a mat file it is just a matter of disconnecting the node from the Gradient_Bump outlet and plugging it in to the displacement.
Now if you look down at the thumbnail window your texture looks very craggy and if you rendered the image with these settings your character will look just as craggy.
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Will Duprï¿½

wdupre · Posted: Sun Dec 22, 2002 9:40 am Post subject:

so we need to dial down the Displacement setting (7) to something more appropriate. In the case of this bump map I found that a setting of 0.008 works well. For your texture you may have to experiment a bit but I have found that most bump maps fall between 0.006 and 0.02. Now that you have set your bump properly you probably should save your resulting mat settings to the materials library so that you can easily load them up onto the appropriate body material, just as you did when you loaded the mats for Judy before. (for Vicky 2 you will add the eyebrow mat group to your head list and with Vicky 3 you will add a lot more groups to your body list, but I will go over that later)
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Will Duprï¿½

wdupre · Posted: Sun Dec 22, 2002 9:41 am Post subject:

Here is the same render above with the Displacement mat setting notice the finer detail in the skin texture.
When rendering you will have to make sure that your firefly renderer is set to use displacement maps and that your displacement bounds are set to something higher then 0 (0.5 should be OK) to avoid clipping. with displacement this subtle, clipping shouldn’t be an issue but why risk it. One more note, the P4 renderer does not utilize displacement mapping so you can get a similar effect by plugging your bump map into the Bump outlet with the same dial setting.
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Will Duprï¿½

wdupre · Posted: Sun Dec 22, 2002 9:43 am Post subject:

Here is the same face with a little more dramatic lighting and ray traced shadows turned on for the main light.
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Will Duprï¿½

akin_ · Joined: 16 May 2002 Posts: 557 Location: LYON 03 - France

That's what I call a TUTORIAL !

Should I translate it into french ??? do you give me your agreement ??

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Akin

If you wish to deserve knowledge, better spread it than hide it !
Le savoir est fait pour être enseigné... Sinon , à quoi sert-il ?
http://anikakin.free.fr/
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wdupre · Posted: Mon Feb 10, 2003 7:07 pm Post subject:

thank you for your enthusiastic response akin_, If you think it would be helpful to translate this tute go right ahead, be my guest.

it is my intention to finish this with a section on eyes and transmaps whenever I get the time. of course if someone else wants to take the ball on that, they are more then welcome.
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Will Duprï¿½