Poser 6, Lesson 4
The Material Room
The directions said "make mental notes how the different settings effect the sphere." Mental notes are not my strong point. Documenting things is. Therefore, here's some documentation.
Diffuse and Ambient Colours
Diffuse: R255 |
 |
Diffuse: B255 |
 |
Diffuse: G255 |
 |
Diffuse: G255 |
 |
| Diffuse: G255 Highlight: R255; Size: 10% Ambient: RG 82, B 164 |
 |
| Diffuse: G255 Highlight: R255; Size: 5% Ambient: RG 82, B 164 |
 |
| Diffuse: G255 Highlight: R255; Size: 20% Ambient: RG 82, B 164 |
 |
Bump
Playin' with various bump maps, varies degress of success. Here's the base object.
| Bump Map | Result |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
At this point, I feel like I'm getting the idea, so I wanted to try something that might prove useful. The process follows, using a graphic from this site.
| Bump Map | Result |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
The last one is not too bad. On to the next topic.
Transparency
I followed the instructions. Whether I understood a thing I did, time will tell. Here is the result.
It appears to be transparent, but to really test this, I'll need to put something behind it (or inside it!). But I was altogether too anxious to get to the next section.
2D Image Textures
All righty, then! Here's the sphere, following the directions. A quick note, however: to follow Step 4 in Poser 6 on a Mac.
The Editor gets really picky, here.
Please note: Mac (note capitalization) is an abbreviation for a particular kind of hardware, produced by a company named Apple, Inc. (formerly Apple Computer Corporation). Only such machines should be referred to using this capitalization. A MAC (note capitalization), an acronym for Media Access Control, is an address, indicating a computer's unique hardware number. Every computer, whether manufactured by Apple, HP, Dell, or that little store down the street where the two guys who just graduated from Rensselaer will build boxen for you, has a MAC address.
Yes, I'm splitting hairs here (or hares, if you don't like Bugs Bunny). I pay the mortgage and put food on the table as a Technical Editor. Being a PITA (Pain In The Arse) is what I do professionally.
George is Back, but has a pickiness hangover
To follow Step 4 in Poser 6 on a Mac, I needed to add a couple of steps here. File, Import, Wavefront OBJ, find the desired object, leave all selections selected, Enter. The italicized stuff is what I needed to add.
George is Really Back now.
So, I imported the object, made the changes to the colors for Diffuse, Highlight, Ambient, and Reflect, applied to texture to the Diffuse channel and got the result, as shown above.
However, I couldn't be sure I understood what was going on until I had made some changes on my own. So I loaded the texture file into Photoshop, made a layer out of each of the three areas, put a custom fill into each of the areas, saved it as a jpg. Here's the texture map I used.
Then I followed the directions to apply a texture and got this:
Changing the Diffuse color to white produced this:
In this one, I see the middle texture, and the granite texture, but I don't see the greyish texture on the top and bottom of the texture map. More investigation is obviously needed.
Material Zones
Followed directions, used #FF0000, #00FF00, and #0000FF for colors, and got this (after moving the camera to get a better view of the North Pole):
Working with James
Here's James, pretty much out of the box (I did apply the texture in the Diffuse area to the Highlight area):
Now we move to the Advanced Material room. When I first moved there, I noticed that both the Diffuse_Color and Specular_Color were attached to the Color Texture node; the Image Map node had nothing attached to it. I moved them both to the Image Map node, and this is the result:
The difference is too subtle for me to see, so I brought them both into Photoshop to see what changes it sees. I didn't see any; I didn't feel you needed a black box to look at, so just take my word for it.
I've now worked in the Advanced tab and followed the directions. No difference. I moved the Bump value to 0.006. No difference. At 0.012, I did see a difference. Here it is:
And the difference. Subtle, but present.
Victoria: The Assignment
See Problems. There were problems. Britt suggested that I turn IK off. Then, the problems went away. Now, I've got more work to do. Tomorrow (Friday), I'll try some other clothing.
OK, I've tried other clothing. I havent had a lot of luck working with Victoria, but I was able to find a piece of dynamic clothing for Jessica. Rather than take the time to learn what the problem is with Victoria (my unfamiliarity with the model is probably the culprit), I went with the Jessica goal.
This was a combination of working the Cloth and Material rooms, as well as developing new textures and transparency maps for the dress. No luck on the transparency. None.
| Original | Texture 1 | Texture 2 |
 |
 |
 |
More for my reference than anything else, the texture and bump maps for the various dresses can be found here.
Continuation of Lesson 3: Applying Texture to Materials
Jessi in Jerusalem
I remembered from the Poser 4 class four years ago, that there was an easy way to apply a background to a scene. Looking around, I found it: File > Import > Background Picture. <irony>Yes, I know it's counter-intuitive.</irony>
I decided to try to apply some external graphics to clothing. I woke Jessica up and got her dressed in the t-shirt and shorts that came with Poser, located the texture file for each and applied Cecily Mark Barker's The Mulberry Fairy to her shirt and her The Lords and Ladies Fairy to her shorts. It took some doing to get them in the proper place on the graphic, but eventually it worked.
I loaded in Gustav Bauerfiend's Scene in Old Jerusalem as a background and rendered. The result was terrible. She looked like a giantess. Back to the Pose Room to re-scale Jessica. Doing that, however, did not work. Despite the fact that I was careful to select conforming clothing and conform them to Jessica, when I rescaled her, the clothing remained the same size.
So, I dollied the camera on the Z axis (moved away from her); this had no effect on the background picture. Yes, she still looks somewhat large, but that's to be expected when a 20th century U.S. girl stands well in front of a group of 19th century Levantines.
LaRoo2 and Sharon at Hearthstone Stairs
For this one, I was able to fit the clothes from Jessica onto LaRoo2 (in the Figures > Runtime DNA folder) with relatively little effort. Then, I found the pattern (I'll know the right name after Lesson 4 is finished), for the dress and applied Cecily Mary Barker's The Lords and Ladies Fairy to it, selected a picture I had taken at Hearthstone Point Public Campground in Lake George, NY, about a year ago, and rendered. The result was awful.
You see, I had forgotten to change the lighting and the first render had a very distinct shadow running from LaRoo2's left to her right, the exact opposite of the lighting in the background. So, I went back in and lowered the intensity of the light and widened the Shadow Blur Radius in the Properties tab for the light doing the dirty work.
The result:
I wasn't particularly happy with the teeth, but am not worried about it, because we haven't covered the Face Room yet, so I'll get to that.
Another note: Why you should not discard second-rate photos. I had almost deleted this photo from the album, because I didn't like the fact that Sharon had turned just at the crucial moment.
Jessi and Victoria
Thanks to classmate Kathy C., I was able to get a copy of V3 and went looking for clothing. I started at Renderosity (where I was surprised to find some of my 2004 work as Gearcy still available in Freestuff) and found that EvilInnocence had made the same outfit for both V3 and Jessi. I downloaded both and, eventually, got them into the proper folders (thanks to Britt for the mini-lesson on organizing).
The V3 version had no problem whatsoever; not so with Jessi. Her top stubbornly refused to conform, so I altered it to cover up the bits I didn't want showing. Then I posed them. Well, actually, I posed the chemise ... for both of them (sometimes, I'm a slow learner). (From the "posing the chemise" experience, I learned that Cmd-S and Cmd-R should always be considered a single operation.) I was able to move them around in the posed position, so that they form the multi-model scene I've ever done. Getting them to appear to look at each other was harder than I thought. I didn't bother, obviously, with a background or hair (don't have any V3 hair yet anyway), and rendered. The result:
When putting this page together in Dreamweaver, I noticed that adding a background not only drastically increases the rendering time, but also makes for larger files. The solution: bring the final render jpg into Photoshop and Save for Web.