I very rarely use somebody else's mapping coordinates. I usually do at first, but eventually I'll start mucking about to twist things to my way. Since I'm not terribly thrilled with SL's body templates, I've been keeping busy with remapping it my style.
This is for 3DS Max, makes use of mapping channels, and relies on texture baking. If you are not a Max user, this will do you no good. Yeah, that sucks. The other thing that sucks is that I don't know about porting the information to other programs. I suspect *.OBJ can handle multiple mapping channels, but I honestly don't know.
And, before I forget, no hands, feet, or head. I might cobble these in later, but you never can tell.
Now, I really wanted to minimize the seams in the seams in the body. And then blend in the seams that remain. And also take care of the arm mirroring while I was at it.
Mapping Channel 1
This is the default mapping provided by LL.
Mapping Channel 2
This is the main unwrap job that I did. I borrowed a simple lay-out from Poser and re-did the whole thing. Seams under the arms, inside of the leg, and a 'T' in the back. The main focus is the front of the torso, so the back is mangled a little bit due to the 'T' back there.
Mapping Channel 3
This is to take care of the seams that do remain. The afore mentioned under arms, inside legs, and 'T' on the back.
Mapping Channel 4
This is used to mirror the left arm to the right arm. Since channels 2 and 3 can be mirrored right in the Material Editor (v +180 degrees), this channel is solely for masking purposes. The blending takes place from the shoulder and fades into the torso.
The Flow
Paint the main body and save to file. This is channel 2. Toss onto the model and bake this to channel 3. To bake to channel 3, you will have to turn off some stuff in the Material Editor.
Save the baked channel 3 to file. Load it up in your paint program and fix the seams. Save it out, load it up in the Material Editor in channel 3 with the appropriate mask.
Make sure the arm mirroring portion of the material is turned on, and bake to channel 1.
To test the arm mirroring, I tossed in a little line along the left arm and goes into the left breastasis.
Currently, there are some serious rubs to using this. Not only do you have to have 3DS Max, but you have to know your way around the Material Editor and how the various maps work. For example, I nested some Mask maps and you will have to know which ones to turn on/off during certain steps.
And there is the lack of hands, feet, and head. I'm sure I'll eventually do the head, but I really don't feel like incorporating hands and feet.
And then there is the file structure in the zip file. Everything is "3dsmax8/maps/remap/..", and I can't remember how Max handles files in zips. My apologies if you end up having to hunt down the textures manually.
Oh, some quick and sleazy texture examples in the zip. There is also a single PSD file with all of the templates in Path form.
And I tried to clean up the scene file as much as possible, but something might still be in there. Maybe a rogue material slot or something. When I get to cobbling like this, I can be very sloppy and hard to clean up after.
And the vert order is totally screwed because of the mirroring tricks used. I don't know if I have the gumption to do a total snap job like Chip mentioned in the other thread. Good to know that I'm not the only psycho around here.
I honestly don't know if anybody out there will use this as is. At the very least, it could be a chance to learn more about mapping channels, the Material Editor, and setting up materials for this kind of work. As kind of a note to this aspect, I worked the material from the bottom up instead of from the top down. I could have went with a Comp, but decided to nest at the bottom to make navigation a bit easier. However, the bottom up approach might cause problems if you decide to try to incorporate other maps for a full-blown light-n-bake job.
Yes, this took some work to set up and takes some work to use, but it will eventually save me lots of time in the long run because I won't have to trial-n-error the seams so much. But there is also the chance that I'll only use once or twice because I'm ADD like that. Use this to make one decent skin, then ready to move on again already.
igh:Good chance I'll take this file down in about a week.
And the list of little things goes on.
DOWNLOAD
remap.zip ~590k