Importing Poser Characters into trueSpace 5 and 6 with the luuv plug-in

Page 3

3B. The eyebrows and eyelashes

Now that our character can actually see, let's turn our attention to the eyebrows and eyelashes. 

- Select the character again. Then click on the Inspect tool in the Material Editor (1). 

- Click on one of the eyebrows (2). This will load the eyebrow color. 

- Go to "Transparency: transparency map" in the color panel (3) and load the transparency map (4). 

- Now apply the transparency map to both eyebrows at the same time by selecting the "Paint over existing Material" tool in the Material Editor (5), then clicking on one of the eyebrows with this tool (6). 

(See Figure 3.3)

Figure 3.6

Now let's do the eyelashes:

- If you want the eyelashes to have the same color as the eyebrows, then just click on one of the eyelashes with the "Paint over existing Material" tool (the Material Editor should still have the eyebrows' color and  transparency map loaded). 

- Or, if you want the eyelashes to have a different color (e.g. darker brown or black), then choose the new color in the Color panel, then click on an eyelash with the "Paint over existing Material" tool. This will apply the color and the transparency map to all the eyelashes. 

3C. The hair

The hair also needs a transmap. The hair that I'm using here (ponytail hair by Kozaburo) is one object in my scene, but it is actually made up of several parts and it uses two different textures and transmaps: one set of texture/transmap for the hair cap and one set for the ponytail parts. To apply the two different textures and transmaps to the hair, we can use the same method that we used for texturing the eyebrows and eyelashes:

- Open up the Material Editor and click on the Inspect tool.

- Click the hair cap. This will load the texture used for that part.

- In the Color panel, navigate to the "Transparency: transparency map" option and load the transparency map for the hair cap.

- Apply the texture and transparency map to this part only by choosing the "Paint over existing Material" tool, then clicking on the hair cap.

- Do the same thing for the ponytail part: load the ponytail's texture with the Inspect tool, open up its transparency map, then apply it to the ponytail parts with the "Paint over existing Material" tool. 

If you imported your character with the groups or if you broke your character up into its groups inside trueSpace then you can just select the different parts and apply the texture and the transparency maps to them with the "Paint Object" tool. 

Finally, here's Vicki 2 after applying the textures in trueSpace:

4. Importing default Poser characters

Importing default Poser characters is very similar to importing DAZ characters, with just a couple of differences:

Poser 4 characters

The skin texture of the Poser 4 characters have both the head and the body on the same map, so you don't have to load different maps for the head and the body when making changes - just apply the same skin texture to the whole figure.

Poser 4 characters have only one eyeball part per eye, so you can just simply  texture the eyes and make them shiny without having to apply two different textures. To do this, first load the texture in the Material Editor, then adjust the parameters in the reflectance channel, then apply this shinier texture to the eyes only by clicking on one of them with the "Paint over existing Material" tool. 

There are no upper eyebrows (the eyebrow is painted on the head texture), so you don't have to apply a transparency map to them, but you do have to apply a transparency map to the eyelashes. To do this, choose a color for the eyelashes, load the transparency map, then click on one of the eyelashes with the "Paint over existing Material" tool. 

Poser 5 characters

Poser 5 characters have three texture maps: one for the head, one for the body, and one for the eyes. So, if you want to make changes to the skin texture, you have to do it separately for the body and the head, just like with the DAZ characters. To change the head texture, first open the Material Editor, then choose the Inspect tool. Click on the head - this will load the head texture into the Material Editor. Make your changes and apply the new texture to the head with the "Paint over existing Material" tool. Now do the same for the body.

Just like Poser 4 characters, Poser 5 characters have no upper eyebrows; the eyebrows are painted on the head texture. For the eyelashes, you have to load and apply the transparency map just like we did with the DAZ characters and Poser 4 characters.

One big difference, however, is that the Poser 5 characters' eyes have 4 parts: a transparent and shiny outer eyeball, the inner eyeball which has the eye texture, a disk for the pupils and a disk for the lens. So, if you import a Poser 5 character, you have to break it up into its groups.

If you import the character with the "Preserve groups" option unchecked, do the following:

- First make the changes to the skin textures and apply the transparency maps to the eyelashes.

- Then click on "Decompose into objects" (1). If you open up the Keyframe/Scene Editor, you can see that now the character is broken up into its parts. Choose the wireframe display mode to enable you to see better (2).

- In my scene, the left eye parts are "NoName, 46 - 49. The first one among these is the outer eyeball. Make it transparent just the way we did with the DAZ character. (3)

- The next object in the list is the inner eyeball. Load the eye texture, make the reflectance shader "matte", and apply this texture to this object. (4)

-The next object is the lens. You can make this totally transparent. (5)

- The last object in this eye group is the pupil. This should already be black. If not, make it all black.

- Do the same steps for the other eye's groups, too. 

(See Figure 4.1)

Figure 4.1

- Open the Keyframe/Scene Editor, then click on the + sign in front of your figure's name to open up the list of objects. Click on one of the eyes (Figure_1 leftEye:1).

- Click on the "Decompose into objects" tool. In tS5, click the Refresh button in the  KFE's toolbar. In tS6, scroll down until you find the new eye group. 

- Now open up this eye group and texture it the same way as above.

- Do the same procedure with the other eye.