Forum: Poser - OFFICIAL


Subject: Antonia - Opinions?

odf opened this issue on Oct 27, 2008 · 13964 posts


MikeJ posted Sat, 10 October 2009 at 10:45 PM

Quote -
the new uvs looks very nice, however my vote goes for the old one as it looks more simple to me... it has less maps and good ratio between head and body parts. also I like lips not to be separated from the head skin

Actually, if you apply a UV checker to the whole thing at once, you'll see that the ratio in the UVs I made are overall more even. I've written several times why I've done it the way I have, and every reason is centered around the idea of making it more overall 3D-friendly as opposed to just Poser-friendly.

However, Olaf did an excellent job UVing the original, and I don't want to sound like I think otherwise. I just didn't like where the seams were, and a few other things.
He did, however, optimize it very well strictly for Poser usage.

I want to see people rendering Antonia in Mental Ray and Lightwave, and not abandoning the idea because, for example, Mental Ray or LW's render engines can't easily do proper SSS with the head mapping the way it was. WIthout a whole lot of guesswork, or maybe not at all. If you'd like a technical explanation of why that is so, I can explain it again, but I wrote about that a few pages back.
I also wanted a version more friendly for 3D painting in general, and certain things about the original mapping made that difficult.
And of course I also tried to make it Photoshop-friendly, for people applying real photos to the templates. Not being a Photoshop texture maker though, that part was more difficult in deciding what to do.
The lips? I dunno... I have mixed feelings about that too, and it sort of flies in the face of my head/SSS plans I mentioned above, but it is still workable, and after all, SSS back-scattering need not reach all the way from the back of the skull to the lips. A 3/4 or a profile view might cause a problem there though.
Most of the way I did it is based on what I was taught by a few professionals I've studied with recently and observations of how other pros have UVd similar figures. Most, not all, and they'd slap me silly for packing it all into 0-1 and overlapping. ;-)
But even though Poser does tiling UVs and can handle UVs laid out in regions, that could create problems for the average Poser user who might not know how to deal with UVs laid out that way, so I had to compromise on that one.

Truth be told about UVs, sometimes you have to make it more complicated, in other words, more UV islands, in order to get the effect you need.

Now I don't think what I've called "final" is perfect and I'm addressing those issues as they come up and will continue to until it IS perfect, based on feedback from the texture makers.