Ok so the mannequins are available.....

Can someone give me an idea of how these could be used in clothes design. I have Photoshop and made basic clothing producing items with alpha channels as a tga file. I have also played with Poser a bit and made some not too clever poses. What impact will the mannequins have for clothes designers. Can you take the tga file into Poser and look at it on one of these new models. Or even better can you design clothes in Poser on these new models and export them to tga for SL. I am just a bit confused at the moment.

Thanks.

Its simple bobby its gonna revolutionalize the industry because now we can create clothing offline. Meaning No 10 per image upload until we are sure its right and....can have prelimnary pics created out of Poser once we do upload.

Thus

#1 Reduces Upload Costs.
#2 Protects Ideas til they are uploaded.
#3 Some times there are those of us that cant get in SL due to not being at home near a Cable Connection.

Thus, all in all...a great day for SL

With Poser and PS you won't be able to use Poser as a clothing design tool, but you will be able to use it as an offline clothing viewer so you can check your textures before you upload to SL. In order for the av models to be useful for the clothing creation process (aside from viewing) you'll need a 3d app with texture baking/render to texture features (like 3ds Max, Lightwave, Maya, etc) or a 3d paint program like Maxon's Bodypaint, Right Hemisphere's DeepPaint 3D, or Cebas's GhostPainter2.

I'm trying to see if there is any software that is not professionally priced that will do what we want. Most don't so far - I'm feeling hopeful about blender - anyone know of any others or other possibles?

Blender should work for an offline previewer (I think, don't know for sure) but I don't think it has texture baking. I could be wrong though. I've never played around with it.

How would you go about using blender as on offline previewer? I don't know anything about the program.

A cheap tool to paint on a 3D surface is Meshpaint
http://www.texturetools.com/MeshPaint.asp

I bought it for $40 or $50 and it is pretty basic but will allow you to paint and view directly on a 3D surface like DeepPaint.
UVMapper (basic) is a free version of a UVmapper for 3D models. This will allow you to take the AV templates and map them to a 3D model. The pro version has many more options and is pretty cheap, but the free version will do just fine. I have used both of these for Poser models before and they work well.
http://www.uvmapper.com/

Hope that helps.

You'd need to import the SL models first, then create textures out of what you want to preview and assign them to the appropriate body parts. If Blender is capable of displaying the bitmaps on the model in its viewport then you'd have a nice fairly simple way to preview and test seams

Mesh paint can't read OBJ files or the poser files. I presume there is a converter available somewhere...

Roberta,

I couldn't find a conversion tool, though there may be one. But if it is needed I can convert the objects to 3ds or lwo using Poser and put them on my site for you to download if you'd like. Let me know.

In case some of you haven't seen this thread
/109/7e/32251/1.html
This is a free alternative to Poser so that you can the textures you create offline.

Could you use Wings3D with the mannequin?

Thanks,
Brianna

Wings3d only has a very primitive material editor and doesn't support bitmap textures (as far as I know) so it wouldn't be of much use as a texture previewer. It also doesn't have any animation capabilities. It's a fun little modeler though if you're using it for things other than SL

Lightwave looks like a really nifty tool for rendering/baking textures. It's also fairly expensive. Is Bryce a comparable, cheaper alternative, or does it do something entirely different from Lightwave/Maya?

Bryce is really first and foremost a landscape generator. As a general use 3d app it's very limited. Not recommended unless you want to do landscape art. As a tool for SL it would be pretty useless.

Thanks for the info, Chip.

I'm trying to use the demo of 3ds studio max but am getting nowhere. I've finally got it to render to texture but the tga files it produces are black when opened in photoshop.

Anyone come across this problem before? Is there anything easier that will render textures?