 Serious stuff... 
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Nik |
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Serious stuff... |
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ID: 8535 - Image Type: JPG - Size: 490 x 572 (29KB) |
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31 Jul 2022 13:12 |
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This is free ''Enforcer'' of the ''military'' team from \"Werewolf: The Apocalypse – Earthblood\" nicely ported to XPS by aleksiszet.
https://www.deviantart.com/aleksiszet/art/Military-by-aleksiszet-870492379
I needed to port him or a colleague to Poser to get a better scale for the set of trucks used in game. ''Rule of Thumb'' is such are nine (9) feet, give or take an inch or two, across the front fender''s box-girder but, this time, that seemed ''off''...
eg https://www.deviantart.com/aleksiszet/art/Military-Truck-v-1-by-aleksiszet-870492297
Whatever, I''ll get back to those free trucks after having fun with these squaddies...
The five free figures came as .XPS format with mapped TGA texture sets. My ($$) 3DOC happily reads and ports most *static* XPS models, eg to OBJ+MTL, but makes a sad mess of rigged. So, I went the ''scenic'' route: Copy folder into free XNA/Lara, open figure, export via ''modify'' menu as .MESH.ASCII. Open this with free Noesis, export as FBX. Take a deep breath, import to Poser, starting at default 100% scaling.
Took me several iterations to decide 10k% was too small, 12k% just too big. I settled on ~11.5k%, 11500% of default.
There are nine (9) sub-rigs, of which the first in list, ''24_Clothes1_0_2_0_0'' is the ''master'' rig for moving, posing and deletion. Poser does not like such surfeits of sub-rigs, tends to crash if you have multiple such figures in scene. I''ve recently found a neat work-around. Instead of parenting each figure''s sub-rigs to a place-holder ''prim'', I used Poser hierarchy tools to first rename this ''master'' sub-rig to ''Enf1_24_Clothes1_0_2_0_0'', then parent the other sub-rigs to its ''root''...
Not brilliant, but better, and much, much more stable...
I got the figure posed fairly well, then realised the helmet visor was opaque. Not a problem, I thought. Perhaps the helmet texture has a transparency map in its Alpha channel ? As yet, Poser does not auto-apply such. An OBJ''s MTL may call a stand-alone transparency map, and a material''s Cycles nodes may be configured to suck Alpha channel from mapped texture. Turns out this figure''s mapped texture is ''very busy'', crammed with disconnected detail. Worse, the TGA''s Alpha-channel appeared to be blank...
So, I used Poser''s I/O tools to selectively export the visor''d helmet as OBJ+MTL. Then I opened the OBJ in my favourite UV mapper. Happily, the map proved to be a sub-set of that busy texture, not re-arranged. I was able to identify the visor. On mapped texture, is the sorta-D-shaped grey blob with four pale spots in lower-right quadrant, just to right of the gloves. I used free Irfan View to paint the visor component white, the rest black, saved as JPG, applied this as helmet''s transparency map.
Lots of light to bring up the nice textures'' colours, Superfly render, Progressive, 96 pixel-samples, 1024 vols & buckets to suit my twin GPU cards.
A last ''gotcha'': I''d had problems convincing Poser to use my transparency map for the helmet. It refused to go ''transparent'', which was so weird. Had this before with TGA textures, solved it by re-saving the main TGA as JPG then using that as ''diffuse''. For better or worse, JPG does not support ''Alpha Channels''...
Later, when playing around with the main TGA, I thought to export it to PNG, which *does* support Alpha channels. To my surprise, among much other detail, this PNG''s ''Alpha'' showed the neat transparency mapping needed for the visor. Ah-Ha ! The ''invisible'' Alpha channel of the TGA must have been interfering with my own transparency map. Who''d have thought ??
But I''ll know to check that next time, so perhaps will not need the DIY UV mapping....
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Nik
Power User
Joined: December 2003
Posts: 728
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31 Jul 2022 16:35
'Band of Brothers'
Figure's sub-rigs 'tamed and tethered' as above, then copied using Poser's 'Edit, Duplicate' tool. This significantly reduces both resource requirements and the chances of crashing Poser's I/O and/or hierarchy...
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Nik
Power User
Joined: December 2003
Posts: 728
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31 Jul 2022 20:29
Dressing scene a bit...
Ground texture is sorta-suede from Poser bundle with 'displacement' dialled up to 'interesting'. LaF's 'combats' from Rendo market, with a free green I found some-where.
Lots of light. Superfly, 96 pixel-samples, progressive, 64 vols+buckets (for CPU-only), rendered in two hours on my networked 'Box. 64 pixel-samples would have done, but I was curious...
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