Using Daz Studio to make Tattoos

OK heres my beef with SL so far.

I make and sell tattoos, yes so do thousands of other people.

I like to think i make good quality tattoos, i use vector art scale accordingly all that stuff.

What i'm rather tired of though is the tattoo always has to be on one side.
Take the legs for example, A large tattoo on the legs either has to be all on the front of the leg or all on the back of the leg.

in order to wrap a tattoo around the leg so to speak you, or I rather, would have to spend hours manually redrawing the texture bit by bit trying to line it up so that it doesnt look like it was cut in half and glued to your leg when its uploaded.

So my thought is what if I find a program that I can open the SL avatar object, then directly apply a tattoo to the model in any location I choose.
The program woudl wrap the tattoo accordingly around the leg or body or what have you.
Then I could export that texture as an image file either for further adjsutments in Photoshop or even ready for upload into SL

Anyone know or have any idea how or even if this is doable?
It would help make for some amasing seamless tattoos and save hours and hours of work which would of course lower the prices ^_^.

Someone told me once I might be able to do this in Daz Studio but my 3D tool skills are pretty limited.

Thanks in advance for any advice.

unless the tattoo is made specifically for the SL avatar OBJ, simply applying a tattoo to it will not work...

The reasons can be kinda simple, and yet seem so complicated..bear with me as I try ti find the right words.. hahaha

The templates you draw on for the tattoo's before you upload them are actually the Avatars map. Each 3d model made has a unique and individual map. Applying one figures texture to another will not work.. The lower part of the body has a seperate map then the upper body on the SL figure.. to see these effects, simply apply a pants texture to the upper body, or vice versa.

so even if you work for hours getting the tattoo to show right in DAZ studio, by the time it does, there's no more need for DAZ, because you've already got it lined up. Make sense?

It's kinda like a second layer of skin.... my skin won't fit you're body, and you're skin won't fit Joe Schmoe's body.. add on top of the simple differences in shape, now imagine your skin layed out on a map.. my skin has the uni-map that DAZ is so popular for making.. which means 90% of my body map is on one page.. split down my back and unfolded out from there... your skin map resembles the SL figures skin map.. cut into an upper and lower body, then cut straight down the middle from side to side.

If these are things you already knew, I appologize and hope that someone who may not know might have learned just a lil

With a 3d paint program, such as DeepPaint or Bodypaint, you can project your tattoos directly at the 3d object LL have made available for us. Also allow you to have a tattoo being a part of for instance both upper- and lower body UV maps. Or extend over seams in the UV maps. You then save the UV maps to disk as images, perhaps tweak a little in any 2d paint program, resize, sharpen, save and upload to sl

EDIT: With experience, patience, Chip's or Robin's templates and a good 2d paint program, it is absolutely possible to create tattoos crossing UV maps and seams without using a 3d paint program. Lots of people paint impressing avatar textures every day. I just mentioned a quick method


Lis

LOL you said it all right there... once you get the feel for these maps.. and are comfortable using one in particular over another, stick with it.. before you realize it, you won't even have to check seams anymore... just by looking at the fine details on the map, it will all start flowing easier

Yes, I've heard of BodyPaint, even have a demo version that came with the demo of something much more expensive.. I'm not sure of the cost, but it's something that in time, you might get your investment back on..

DeepPaint is something I'm not familiar with.. is it cheap? (can't blame a girl for trying.. lol)

Check out http://www.righthemisphere.com/products/dp3d/Deep3D_UV/index.htm for info and cost of DeepPaint. Demo is available for download.


Lis

Might also want to check out Tattoo, a nifty 3D paint program that you can import the existing SL texture maps into I believe.

Hi everyone!

Alysa, you're absolutely right about needing the map to match the model. What I'm guessing you're not aware of is that DAZ Studio is a free 3D scene-building application, not one of their models. You can upload any model to it, and view it with its own UV Map.

So, if you open the Linden Avatar models in DAZ Studio, you're seeing them with the correct UVs.

The problem is that you can't draw on them in there. So, Laire, you could check your whole-body tattoo, but not create it in DAZ Studio.

You could draw directly on the model in the other programs mentioned, or in MAXON BodyPaint, which is the one I happen to have. The problem is that, in my experience, the positions of the polys on those figures don't match the polys on the Avatars in-game.

I'm not saying the UV Map is different. It's not, and if the seams match on the figures in Poser, or Studio, or anywhere else then they will match in game, too.

But when I draw a straight line on the Avatar in BodyPaint, and bring it into SL, it's no longer anywhere close to a straight line. The male model is much worse than the female (so much worse that I don't even attempt to use it any more; it has so little resemblence to the males in-world,) but both of them are pretty inaccurate.

So honestly, in my experience, for the kind of work that you are doing, where you need precision, you'll be happier using the Maps that Chip or I did, and not using a 3D Paint program.

If you want to see pictures of what I'm talking about, by the way, let me know. I got BodyPaint specifically to make it easier to create clothing for Second Life, and I was bitterly disappointed to find that it actually made it harder.

Thanks Robin! Finally someone else confirm my own findings! Thought I were crazy or something since nobody else have neither mentioned this nor seen it as a problem. And if someone did, I must have missed that post

Making textures for our avatars will therefor allways be trial and error where one builds up experience how to avoid problems. That is until LL give us exact tools - as I've mentioned in another post.


Lis

yes, I know what DAZ is I have had it since the very early stages in development.. I also have both Poser 4 and 6 which are always fun to play with..

Most of the texture problems come down to something that will most likely never be resolved. A bad and hurried unfolding of a model's UVMap.. Unfortuneately, even if they were to redo it, at this point in time.. that would mean a whole lot more than a new update... each and every piece of clothing still used in SL would need redone to match the new maps. Which makes this update alot less feasible

I can't even begin to tell you how many times I badly wanted to make a new UVMap for a piece of poser clothing I'd bought, just so it would be easier, and smoother to use.. but if I did, no-one else could use the map I made because it wouldn't match the one that came with their model.. (not to mention you have to actually recreate a newly mapped .obj file as well.. lol)

My comment about the maps not fitting other models, from earlier, was most likely because I may have misunderstood her post..to me, it read that she wanted to be able to put for example, a tattoo made for Vicky onto the SL figure's body.. and that just wont' work..


--One of these days, I'm gonna have to take the time to figure out how to use BodyPaint... lol I can never find the actual "paint" button.. hahaha Until then, I'll stick to PSP

Thanks everyone for your replys but as stated in the first post these are all things I know.

I'm a little sad that it seems im simply not going to be able to make this simple.
Having to put in 6 7 or 8 hours of work jsut to get one simple little tattoo to look right when wrapped around a leg is jsut not something I can do.

My actual drawing skills are very limited, so to sit there with the pen tool and draw half of something on the front of the leg then draw the other half of something on a differnt leg is jsut beyond my ability or time.

I have many many unique designed I have created in vector drawing programs i posses and I cna export them all as any format I want.

Then i bring them into photoshop, and plop them on chris's templates.

Problem then is if I put half of it on the front of the leg, positioning it and then skewing the other half to fit on the back of the leg is jsut so much time and effort for something that it seems not alot of people are interested in.

As I said I don't have the heart to rip off people and charge them $1000 for a tattoo simply because linden make it take hours to put on thier textures.

This really sucks. There jsut doesn't seem to be a way to make this simple.

Thank you everyone for your posts.
they were appreciated none the less.

Laire, what version of Photoshop are you using? Because the Warp Transform in PS CS2, while it doesn't make this kind of thing one-click simple, can make it certainly doable. And since you can save the tattoo as a Smart Object, and just swap the image in the Warp, you would only have to do it once, for many different designs.

The time taken, when spread over a number of tattoos, might make it worth it. I dunno.

Looks like Photoshop CS V8.0
Not familar with this warp feature but Ill dig into the help files right away

Ummmm.... Okay, although it's usually just called PS CS.

The next version is CS2. Photoshop, for reasons of its own, dropped the 8.0, 9.0 etc. naming convention (except in very small print,) when it came out with the whole Creative Suite thing.

PS CS doesn't have the Warp Transform feature, I'm afraid. That was something that was introduced in CS2.

So, ummmm, if you're using CS, then never mind.

I suppose it might be possible to use Liquify to do this, but since the saved Liquify things work on the whole layer, it would be more trouble than it's really worth. You would have to make sure that the tattoo is exactly the same size, and occupies exactly the same position on the page, every time.

With Smart Objects and Warp, you don't have to do that. But, once again, Smart Objects are a CS2 feature, too.

Honestly, there's a huge difference between the two programs; and those two bits are only scratching the surface.