Getting textures (clothing) into Poser

I know this is a question that has been asked.. I am wondering after I get the SL avatar loaded in Poser. How do I see MY created clothing, tats and things like that on the model.?
Glen

It depends on what version of Poser you have. It's one of the things that changed completely between versions a while back.

So, if you can tell me which version, I can give you instructions. (Unless someone else beats me to it. )

heheh Poser 5. Cant figure it out for the life of me..LOL
Glen

Okay! It's a little complicated, but not hard. I'm going to tell you, without illos, to save time and download. But if you can't figure it out from this, and you want to see screenshots, let me know.

1. Open Poser, and make sure the correct figure is loaded, etc.

2. Click on the tab at the top that says, "Material." This opens the Material room, which looks a little different. Once there, you'll see a large window which is probably empty. At the top of it there is a menu which lists, "Object", "Material", and "Node Options."

3. Click on the Object menu in that window, and choose the correct figure from the drop down list. Probably Figure 1. The "PoserSurface" panel for one of the Materials will open. You'll be able to tell which one from the color at the top, since the default SL AV is, shall we say, brightly colored.

4. Click on the Material Menu, and choose the correct material from the list. They are named Material_Lowerbody, Material_Upperbody, and so on. You'll want the same name as the Template you were working on, of course.

5. Click on the Diffuse Color swatch, at the top of the PoserSurface panel, and change its color to white. This acts like a tint, and will affect the colors of your material.

6. Click on the little icon directly to the right of the Diffuse Color Swatch. It looks like a plug, or something. When you click on it, a menu will fly out, that says "Disconnect" (which is probably dimmed) and "New Node."

7. Mouse over "New Node," which will open another fly out.

8. Mouse over "2D Textures" (at the bottom) which will open another fly out.

9. Choose "image_map" from the last fly out. A new panel will appear, titled Image_Map, and connected to the Diffuse Color with a cyan line (although you probably won't see that unless you drag the window to the right.)

10. Click directly on the word "None" next to "Image_Source". It's in the first line of the Image_Map panel. Another dialog window opens, that has a drop down menu of all textures currently loaded (Probably "No Texture" and "Ground Default Texture'.) Below that is a button labeled "Browse."

11. Click the "Browse" button.

12. You will (finally!) get to a normal browser window. Find your texture, and Open it. Its name will appear in the dialog from step 11.

13. Click OK to accept the texture. It will appear on the AV, and also at the bottom of the PoserSurface window.

14. Repeat steps 3-13 for each Material.

15. Click on the "Pose" tab at the top of the window to return to the Pose Room, which is the one where you do the work in Poser.

Yeah, I agree that all of that is much more complex than it needs to be; but it's set up to do a lot of stuff that we aren't using, when we're just checking image maps. And the complexity is for that (or so they tell me.)

Also, it goes very quickly once you get used to it.

So, let me know if you need screen shots!

Thanks for the speedy reply, will be trying it when I get home this eve. This should save me alot of cash uploading and testing.. Uploading and testing..LOL thanks again. If I have any questions, I will post ..
Glen

Great mini-tutorial there, although I was wondering if you could perhaps offer this same information for Poser 6 (Which is what I have.) Been wondering this myself. Thanks in advance!

Thanks! As far as I know, it's the same for Poser 6. (I don't have it, so I can't test, but I think it is.) Edit. It is different, after all! See next post for instructions.

It was between 4 and 5 that they totally changed how things were done, when they introduced the "Node System" and the Material Room to handle it.

However, it did occur to me this morning that I didn't tell you how to see your Alpha channels, if you want to do that. Poser ignores the Alpha in .tga files, so it does take a little more work to see it. But it's possible.

To do it, you first need to save the Alpha channel as a separate black and white image in your Graphics program. (You can generally do that by just Selecting All in the channel, Copy, open a new doucment, and Paste.)

Once you have done that, move to Poser,

1. In the Diffuse channel, open a New Node > Math > Blender. It's on the menus, just the same way you picked Image_Map before, but with different choices, of course. It opens a Blender dialog.

2. Click the Input_1 color swatch, and choose a skin color. This will be the background that the clothing will show up against.

3. Click the Input_2 color swatch, and change the color to white.. Once again, this will tint the image. Since it's black by default, you won't be seeing anything but black if you miss this step.

4. Click the Input_2 node icon, choose New Node > 2D Textures > image_map, and browse to your image. This part is exactly the same as my post above, really.

5. Click the Blending node icon, choose New Node > 2D Texture > image_map, and browse to your Alpha image. It's really just the same, but you want the black and white image you saved, for this one.

6. Change the Blending Value to 100%. Just click on the white numbers n that line, which will bring up the Parameter dials, and type 100 into the text field.

7. Return to the Pose Room. You will notice that you aren't seeing the "skin" on the figure. That's normal. Poser 5 Open GL doesn't support that kind of thing. (I don't know if 6 does, or not.)

8. Render to see the materials applied. When you render, you'll see things the way that you will in Second Life, more or less. The Alpha channel tends to be harsher in Poser, and, as noted in other threads, the stretching and stuff can be different. But it'll be really, really close.

This is complex enough that I'm including a screen shot to help illustrate what I mean. As you can see, the Blender is "plugged in" to the Diffuse channel (green line,) the skin tone is in the Input_1, the shirt color is plugged to Input_2 (cyan line,) and the Alpha is plugged to Blending (purple line.) I've closed the text portion of the dialog in both Image_Map windows by clicking on the icon second from the right, and opened the Preview by clicking on the eye icon to the far right of each window title bar, which is why you are looking at pictures, not lines of parameters. It just seemed easier to tell which was which map that way.




Now, of course, you can use this same thing to pile nodes on nodes on nodes (which is the whole point of the Node system, after all.) So you can put the bottom of a jacket over a pair of jeans on the Material_Lowerbody by putting the jeans into the Input_1 of a Blender node, the Jacket into the Input_2, and Blending using the Jacket Alpha.

So you can preview whole outfits, and make sure that it all works the way you want it to. It sounds really complex, but once you get used to it, it's not hard.

It still won't look right in the Poser window until you Render, but it should be fine then.





Hope this helps!

Okay, I downloaded the Demo of Poser 6, just to see what the differences are.

Getting your textures in without alphas is really easy now! They have added a new "Simple" tab, and it has boxes that correspond to the various main attributes, which really does simplify things. Assuming that your figure is loaded, and Poser is open;

1. Click on the Material tab to open the Material Room. Exactly like you would for Poser 5.

2. Choose Object and Material from the large window menu, just to the right of the "Simple" and "Advanced" tabs. This is assuming that you are using the Simple tab, and works exactly like the first mini-tut post.

3. Click the Color Swatch under Diffuse Color, and change it to White. This is to eliminate the tinting, as before.

4. Click the empty square under Diffuse Color. This opens the Texture Manager window, which has a preview window! Nice addition.

5. Click the Browse button, and browse to your texture. This, also, works the same way it did. Except that if you look in the menu, there are a lot more things pre-loaded. By the way, if you've already loaded a texture, you can just choose it from the drop down menu.

6. Click OK, and admire the texture on the model. Of course, you won't actually see it on the model unless you have the Document Display Style set to Texture Shaded, (click the little ball with the stripes on it in that portion of the interface to change it,) but you can see it when you render, regardless.

If you want to use the Alpha maps, just click the Advanced tab, and it opens what seems to be exactly the same interface that we had in Poser 5. At least, it all works the same way. So just follow those instructions.

You still can't see the alpha on the model until you Render, by the way.

Hope this helps!

Robin - you absolutely rock! I have been waiting months for someone to tell us simply how to preview in Poser. Thank you, thank you, thank you!

Alright, my biggest problem it seems is I am unable to load the proper figure in Poser 6. I downloaded the ones provided by SL, are those incorrect? Anyways, when I follow the instructions, I am still unable to get it to display correctly on my current figure, if that makes sense. Alright, please let me know how and what I need to download Thanks!

Are you getting error messages when you try to open the figure?

If not, are you seeing the textures properly on the Preview in the Poser Surface window in the Material room? (That's the picture at the bottom of the panel; the one that shows a shirt on a pink background in the screen shot above.)

If so, have you made sure that the Document Display is set to Texture Shaded?

What happens when you render in Poser? (Command/Ctrl+R)

I'm afraid that "It's not working" doesn't really give us enough information to figure out why it's not.

I used the figures from the Linden download in the Poser 6 demo. It did ask me to locate the "_POSER_TMP_.pz2" file, but when I told it not to look for it, it opened without problems.

Oddly, when I double click on the SL AV, which adds the figure, (instead of replacing it, like it does in earlier versions,) the error message doesn't show up. So if it bothers you, you might want to do that, and then just delete the default figure. (James, in the Demo.)

But I'm not having any trouble with the textures in Poser 6.

So, let us know!

Sorry, I'll try to elaborate.

I am unable to load the provided figures that SL offers. They just do not load into the system, or maybe I am doing it wrong. How do I load them? I'm going File > Open > Then searching for the SL Avatar folder (it doesn't show anything so I click All Files and click the obj). Am I doing that part wrong or is there something else I must use? I hope that helps understand the situation a little better. And yes, James is still loaded even when I file open those provided files... so I'm doing something wrong here Thanks for all your help!

Robin, It's all correct as per what you've wrote... but the problem remains in getting it to load the provided files, not use the default James file So, if you could help me in that field then that'd be wonderful

Disregard being unable to get the figure to load, I didn't realize the readme until now. Ok, now I've got it all working yay... one question though, do these basically look the same as if they were put on a t-shirt in SL?

Ah! Yes, you do need to manually place the Avatar folder into the Character directory of your Runtime > Libraries folder, and the Clothing files into Runtime > Props. If you don't put the whole folder in there, it won't run the way it should.

Glad that you got it working! (Sorry I was too busy to check these threads last night.)

As for your shirt looking like it will in SL, it will be close; but it's a UV Map. And the thing about UV Maps is that they act like super stretchy spandex that is pinned to the model. The pins are at the vertices, where two of the lines on the UV "cross." Everything between the pins is extrapolated.

So when you see the texture on an AV, it will stretch between the points. How much it stretches depends on how far the points are from their relative positions on the map. Since, in SL, people can make their AVs all kinds of shapes, there is often a great deal of stretching.

So, when you look at your T-shirt on the Poser figure, the big circle might be perfectly round, and you might be very pleased with it. But on any particular AV, it might be distorted in all kinds of ways.

My advice is not to worry about it. Things get distorted on tight tees in RL, too; and most residents have learned not to see the distortions here. Just make sure it's centered correctly, and that seams and things match (which you will be able to see on the Poser model,) and don't worry that it won't look exactly like that within SL.

Hope this helps!

Do you know if the SL Mannequins can also be used for creating animations or do you still have to use the poser2 figures.

Use the SL Mannequins, by all means!

The animation might still have to be tweaked, depending on the parameters used in the target AV; but, in my experience, it's cut my "trash" animations by more than 90%.

The female is more accurate than the male, who seems to be much more "barrel chested" than most of the AVs in SL. But both are far more accurate than the Poser 2 figures.

Thank's Robin.

I am still new and have no experience with Poser. I have noticed that whenever I move the camera view or view something animated in Poser it seems to revert to a very blocky character. Is that normal or just how I have things setup.

Hi Bobby!

Both!

Depending on how you set things up, that's normal.

There are three kinds of "tracking," Box Tracking, where things always look like they are made out of blocks (actually the bounding box of each group of polys,)
Fast Tracking, where things are fully rendered except when you are moving them, at which point they revert to the boxes, and Full Tracking, where things are rendered all the time.

Somewhere on your interface (sorry, but it's so customizable that it's impossible to tell,) you'll have a series of three little button icons. One has a box, one has a box with a sphere inside it, and one has a sphere. The middle one is probably lit up, while the other two are dark.

Click on the Sphere, and you'll have Full Tracking.

Way Back When, it was really necessary to have Fast Tracking, since nobody had a machine that could render all the polys in a Poser model in Real Time. But most modern machines have no problem with it, and the SL AV is pretty low poly anyway.

So go ahead and use Full Tracking, and enjoy it!