Poser and textures

Whilst wandering through some Poser sites looking for tutorials fir animations etc. I came across some nices clothes and clothing textures for certain Poser bodies. I know the format is totally different to SL in that respect. But anyone know if its possible to use textures at least from Poser outfits. As far as I can tell you get a jpg thumbnail which is usually just a small idea of what it looks like. A psd file which looks like one of our alpha masks though not always. Others have rsr, obj and cr2 files. Any experianced Poser users? Am I wasting time looking along this route?

Bobby,

you can, after a fashion, with some serious shoehorning. But to be honest it requires quite some ability to stick it all back together and patch it all up.

Usually you will find that the clothing that come with textures will simply have a jpg, bmp, tif or whatever included in the distribution. Ordinarily most people will distribute in the correct heirarchy for unzipping direct to your poser install folder, so look down the tree thru the runtime folders and you'll generally find a texture one there.

These will be in the poser body template format, which will differ depending on whether its for a poser 2,4 or 5 type figure, or for Vicky or Steph etc. Complicated I know.

But anyhoo. Basically, all you can do is to load up the SL upper or lower body template as required, resize it up to as near the poser template as you can, and essentially cut, paste and stretch the garment pieces until they kinda fit over the template. This will usually mean cutting arms, leg pieces, torso etc all out seperately, putting them into layers and then when you're reasonably happy with the positions, merging them down and blending or 'stitching' the joins together.

This gets exponentially harder when there are intricate alphamasks involved, but with these, the easiest way is actually to load them in with their original alpha masks before you start cutting them up and save them out as a .psp or .psd or .tga with the alpha's intact so that you can cut and paste with the transparencies included. That way its a helluva lot easier to make an alpha back out of when you're done playing.

Sounds hard, but all that said, it can produce some great results and there are some amazing clothing out there for Poser.

HTH,

I would be very wary about doing this. If it's for your own personal use, it's probably all right. But I wouldn't suggest re-selling anything you make this way, even if it requires some finangaling. Again, it comes back to asking the creators, and since we're dealing with a RL$ conversion, I'm not sure the people who would give out such things for free would be happy with people redistributing their work, even modified - and making money off of it.

Just ask yourself, if it was yours, would you want someone turning around and making money off of your work?

I knew this issue would come up when people started discovering Poser through the anim tools. I was a part of the Poser community for many years, and there are some great clothing textures that require less cutting and adjustment than people photosourcing. I just suggest people think twice, or ask the creators before they consider selling these 'creations'. Most of the time? When it's tagged for commercial/non-commercial use, they mean that you can render an image and sell it, not that you can modify it and redistribute it, which I believe SL counts as. Most of the time, they even have it quite specifically listed as no redistribution.


Not a dig at you, Bobby, by any means. I'm not suggesting you planned to do this. It's a general message to the community at large.

Bobby-

Some of the top clothiers in SL make their fashions in this way. It's very profitable and completely unethical.

It is possible . Ive made several textures for poser peope and have just began remapping them to use in Sl. Also a few that i have purchased from other poser vendors Ive been able to make work on sl figures (of course these are for my personal use,as I agree there could be a problem with selling others work ).The hardest part is aligning the eyes . Sl bodies are a breeze, they dont require the detail that a poser does. If you look in some of the free stuff areas on the poser sites there are lots free skin textures, the quality sometimes isnt very good , but sometimes you get lucky and find a good 1 ..Dl one and give it a try .

I must restate that I agree that these textures should not be sold . Like I said ,Ive made textures for posers and it is alot of hard work and hours of time ...I belong to many poser communities and have for quite a long time and I know for a fact if a vendor finds their textures are being sold there will be giant legal problems for whoever does it and SL.Even if it is only a portion of the texture . But , if you purchased a poser texture and would like to use it for your own avatar Im sure there is not a problem with that . People constantly have to remap the poser textures they have purchased to fit newer poser models .

My above post sounded like I was condoning remapping and selling others work ..so I just had to clarify it a bit . I totaly am not -

Not really a problem. I have never sold anything other than a piece of land in SL. There was just a few clothing textures that interested me. I did try to scale and modify them and had some luck, but not much. I was not even considering a complete garment as the work to convert looked too hard. It has given me ideas for textures though and I will try and base an idea on some of them.

I am just reading the license that applies to the pack of textures I was thinking of buying. The following tends to suggest I can use them as long as I don’t do it in such a fashion as to make the textures easily extractable by anyone else.

“Buyer acquires the copyright to any derivative works created using this work providing non of the materials can be extracted from the derivative work by any means.” “For example buyer cannot make an image of a texture mapped to a flat plane such that the original texture map can be cut and pasted from the image”.

“Buyer is granted a non-exclusive license to use all the contents of the encapsulating archive file” “Buyer may use the materials in any personal projects or commercial projects as long as the artists work is protected from extraction”.

To me that says I can use the textures if I have bought them as long as I don’t pass them on or make it that they can be extracted from anything I make.

I just went looking for textures I could buy to use as I am no good at making them. I have no intention of copying a garment and adapting it. But if it's that sensitive then I probably wont bother as it’s not worth the hassle.

The problem with buying poser textures for clothing in sl is this .....the clothing made for poser people is modeled ..Unless you have poser and a figure to put the clothing on and then render the image and cut out the actual clothing from the figure that is wearing it ..buying poser clothing will be of no use to you for SL . Each item is mapped differently, when you purchase a package it will have the textures but not like you think ..they look more like thrown together swatches . for example , say you buy a pair of boots , the texture you get with those boots will not look like a pair of boots but probably different reflection maps for the buckles and swatches of textures for the boot fabric. The boot itself will be an actual 3d object modeled in a program like Rhino or Max . Imagine it like a molded piece of clay It only becomes an actual Boot when you add the boot on the poser figure . Does that make sense ?

Just a little FYI since it appears the rest of your questions have already been answered. I'm not a Poser expert, but I am well experienced in other 3D applications, and I can tell you that these files will be useless for your purposes. But since you asked (at least I think you aksed) here's what they are:

RSR is a special format for images used in Poser to create thumbnails for Poser's libraries. It's very unlikely that this will be of any use to you for SL.

OBJ is a generic file format for describing polygons in 3D space. OBJ format can be read by most 3D applications. OBJ files have nothing to do with 2D texture images at all, and will not be of any use to you.

CR2 is a text based file format that has to do with character rigging behaviors for animation purposes. Again, this has nothing to do with texturing and it will be useless for you.

As has been said repeatedly, your best bet is to make your textures in Photoshop, using the templates provided. I know you said you doubt your abilities in that regard, but I can promise you it's much easier to take a few pictures of clothing out of your own closet and just distort them to fit over SL templates than it would be to try to pull apart Poser files and make them work for SL. As Ambayance said, those packaged files you are talking about are most likely a collection of shaders, swatches, UV maps, reflection maps, bump maps. etc., none of which would be useful for SL.

If you're dying to spend your money, there are loads of talented people in SL who can make anything you can think of. If one of those Poser packages strikes your fancy, show some pics of what you like to one of them and I'm sure they can replicate it. I'd offer myself, but I'm too busy with other projects right now. I can certainly recommend some people who might be able to help if you want though. Find me in world some time. I'm usually in Indigo.

Thanks Ambyance2 and Chosen. I had realise the files in general were useless. I had merely come across a few example clothes, looked at the jgp's and liked the texture of the clothes in them. One a lacy pattern and another a flower one. They were large enough and flat enough. But I have found another source now. Thanks for the advice.

In my experience, this has never been necessary, hence the advice in my previous post. And I really doubt that rendering it on a figure and then cutting it out is likely to give anywhere near satisfactory results. I've always worked from the original template when I wanted to convert. *shrug*

Hmmm ..i dont see how you used the original poser "clothing" template to convert . Most clothing for poser people doesnt come with a template that has the actual clothing design or print on it . A few vendors will offer their blank temlate so others will be able to design their own fabric for that vendors item . (Each clothing item has its own specific template).

Rendering and cutting out the clothing would make a hell of alot more sense , as your rendering with lights etc that are often made to highlight certain features of the particular item your working with . It would be no different than what alot of designers do here ...cut clothing from images . Wether it be magazine ads or photos they have taken themselves .

Personally , I dont like either method to do SL clothes . I find it best just to paint everything straight on the template sl provided ,alot of the clothing here looks like its been done with very low res photos . Maybe , Ill feel different as i get more into it ....Ive only been here a week ,who knows what the future may hold

And to Bobby - there are fantastic ways to apply texture in photoshop, texture overlay being one of them . If you ever need any help look me up . ~ amber