I have been using Poser5 for about a year and upgraded to Poser6, but I am disappointed with the bugs in it. I have purchased Hexagon, and love it. I also bought Carrara4.1 and TransPoser2.0 at the same time, but have only started to play with it lately. Carrara seems to be a powerful platform, but I was curious about some of the plugins. I have seen ads for Baker, and trying to figure out more information about how it works. I am assuming that I can use procedural skin textures on a Poser model, and then "bake" the texture to it, creating a texture map. I can then take this map into Photoshop for editing, and can re-apply this texture as a MAT pose for the Poser character. Is this how it works? I am hoping so, as I do not have the funds and time for ZBrush, but I was looking for a way that I can circumvent ZBrush, until I can afford it. If my reasoning is correct, and I can make textures this way, I may just buy Baker, and then use the now free Deep Paint to make interesting textures. Thanks for listening to my ramblings, -The Starkdog

I haven't tried Baker. However, on .obj export from Carrara, you can select "convert procedurals to texture" also. Depending on how you've constructed your shader, sometimes the results are really good and sometimes they're just ok, though.

Attached Link: www.uvmapper.com

Baker seems really fit for this, your way of working sounds right. You have to have your UV mapping right to make any sense of the results of baker OR converted procedurals. I have used it that way, also in combination with UV Mapper to get the positioning right. Oh, by the way, Poser 6 does not import everything yet with TransPoser 2.0. But if you want to stop spending money, you might want to check out UV Mapper first. It helps you create UV maps, which you can export, and the model with those UV codinates that you can report in Carrara. The baking of procedural shaders may not have to be necessairy. Just build the textures in Photoshop. Good luck!

Baker is excellent for many things but I'm not sure how it would handle Poser's overlapping UVs. (These are a problem in ZBrush too!) You might need to remap the UVs and import the obj into Carrara rather than using Transposer. OR if you isolate the different groups (exported separately from Poser) before shading and baking it should work fine. That way would give you more control anyway. You could then composite your different baked textures with the Poser-supplied UV map so that everything is in its correct position.

Have a look at UVMapper Pro.(same site as above but costs) It will give you realtime 3D view while you edit a texture in Photoshop.

Message edited on: 06/07/2005 10:24

Cool, Thanks for the info. Now I just gotta figure out how to use Carrara. -the Starkdog