Cutting Clothes in UV Mapper for Poser, pt III
Good thing you love tea, eh? (Or is it tea-quila by now?)
Now, I noticed an ugly seam in my outfit. Well, since this is a freebie, I'll declare mistake to be a feature of the outfit. (No, I don't work for Microsoft!)
If you don't have the object loaded in UV Mapper, load it back up.
Actually, for a plain top, planar mapping isn't a bad idea, but currently we have both the front and back together. Let's fix that:
Now we have everything showing again, correctly mapped by group.
To create my "feature" for my shirt, I'm going to split the materials on my shirt front and back so I have a panel effect.
Since I want the trims to stay as is, I'm going to select each trim and hide it. (You'll note that when you have a split planar map, your right part of the shirt is on the outsides of the map, while the left side is on the inner part of the map.)
Now I just select one half of the front, assign it to the Material Shirt-RightFront, then hide it. I then created and assigned Shirt-RightBack. Here's what it looked like after I assigned and hid both right parts of the shirt:
Every time I assign a texture, I then hide it so I can clearly see what's left. Once I've assigned all the textures, I'm going to unhide everything. (Select: Display: Toggle will unhide everything that's hidden, and hide everything that's visible.)
Here's what my map looks like now that I've assigned materials to everything. (I went to Map: Color: by Material for this.)
Why do this extra work? (Besides to hide a mesh flaw?) It makes it easier to customize the shirt without needing to use a texture map. The newest DAZ creations, for example, have several extra material zones, just to make it easier for users and texturers to make sure they'll have clear, sharp lines to work with.
Tip: with Planar Mapping, the sides get crunched together. I changed the mapping to Cylindrical, along the Y axis, in order to check the sides and make sure they were assigned to the different materials properly. (You can see this clearly on the left-hand side by the sleeve where the black stops and the blue begins.)
When I was satisifed with the mapping, I changed it back to Planar Mapping on the Z axis, then saved the model.
To create the template map for the clothing, just go to File: Save Template. It will create a .bmp file for you. (It's common courtesy to include templates with meshes. If you get a mesh without a texture template, you can simply load the object into UV Mapper and do File: Save Template to get the template. You don't need to - and don't want to - change the mapping without good reason.)
And if you really want to get involved, flipping the texture around on different axis to make sure the material groups are straight, you can make things like this:
Note: if you have an unusual outfit, or you're trying to fit it to a morphed version of a figure, you may need to tweak the joint parameter settings. The only advise I can give is to check out Dr. Geep's excellent Joint Parameter Primer for ideas on where and how to adjust the settings.
Download the finished Victoria Quarter Shirt.