Mapping footCubes
By Bill Allen

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It's a wrap Rasterizing vector art

Screen shots Doing vector art

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Introduction
Mystified by what's going on when you try to apply a map to a Poser 3 prop or figure element? As you can see by the image at right, you can quickly get your first clue from assigning a grid map and seeing how it lands.
___ Across the top, left to right, are a Poser/Prop Types/cylinder and torus, and a footCube1x1w. Across the bottom are a Poser/Prop Types/cone and Ball, and a footCube1x1 (a footCube8x8 would look the same in its place). All are assigned as Surface Material/Texure Map the same Flat 8x8 Grid from Template Downloads.
___ The footCubes are from Props Downloads, and how they map differently is both instructive and useful. On one, the map falls once per side on all six sides. On the other, it lands only once and wraps around the six sides, with large areas of the map not appearing at all. Studying this result led to the creation of a template that can help you land a perfect a Texture Map every time, even when multiple footCube1x1w's are scaled into various shapes as building blocks.
___ With the Poser/Prop Types/cylinder, not only does applying the test map show that a map will wrap once fully around the object, distorting horizontally in the process, but the same map also fits once as a flat projection on the cylinder's top side. Note that the top middle line of the top map exactly meets the seam of the side mapping. This may be a problem, but now it is a known problem, and you can work accordingly.
___ The grid maps shown here are from Template Downloads, but you can make your own or modify these to get just what you need. For instance, a 12x12x12 grid proved more useful than an 8x8 grid in understanding the mapping of the footCube1x1w measure prop. Figuring out how a complex object receives a map could be considerably more difficult, but starting with a simple 8x8 grid should quickly give you an idea of how to approach the task.
___ With objects that have many faces, you may want to match or approximate the map to the object's structure. At right, you can see how the 8x8 grid template overlaps the mesh of an 8x8x8 footCube.

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It's a wrap
While importing cubes from various applications as candidate footCube measure props, a cube primitive was brought into Poser from Painter 3D, and found to have a mapping entirely different from others. Studying it with a 12x12x12 grid resulted in creating a template that lands perfectly, and both this footCube and its template are provided in Downloads for your own use.
___ In the image at right, to the left, you can see this template, cubewrap.tif, applied not very usefully to a footCube1x1. The result is the same with a footCube8x8. To the right, you can see the potentially very useful application of the same template to a footCube1x1w prop.

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Rasterizing vector art
While the maps you apply to Poser objects must be in a "raster" file format, such as TIFF, including templates, you may find it useful to create templates and sometimes maps starting with a drawing program that works with "vector" file formats, such as AI or EPS. These programs include Illustrator, FreeHand, CorelDraw, and others. Most can output a "rasterized version" of the vector art.
___ For example, in Illustrator 7, use File/Export/Save as type: TIFF. Choose a Color Model--RGB for texture maps, and Grayscale for black-and-white templates and bump maps. Generally, you want Anti-Alias ON, and also LZW Compression (unless you are still using Poser 3.0). Choosing a Resolution is where your mapping education really begins. Too large and you unnecessarily overload system resources and the rendered result may not look nearly as good as what you'll get with a smaller map. Too small, though, and you will get blurred results that you probably won't like. The template TIFFs offered for download here were created in the real world file to be one inch across, and were rasterized at 300 "dpi" (more correctly, "ppi"--pixels per inch), which works fine for one-foot cubes in Poser, but that resolution could easily be wrong (too big or too small) for other uses.
___ With some vector programs, such as early versions of Corel and Illustrator, you may get better rasterizing results by importing the file into an image editor or paint program such as Photoshop (unfortunately, Painter 3D doesn't import AI/EPS files). If you go this direction with template files, you may find that you get better, or at least more predictable, results if you import with antialiasing turned OFF. And remember that Photoshop will default to screen resolution (e.g., 72dpi) or the last setting you used for rasterizing.
___ Try to rasterize directly to final optimum resolution. Rescaling a raster file can cause major problems, especially where there are straight lines and/or type. A trick that can sometimes work for scaling up, without "dithering" artifacts, is to change the color mode to indexed color and then increase the file size in even multiples such as 200 or 400%. Going to exactly 200% while in indexed color mode, one pixel becomes four yet remains in complete symmetry with its neighbors. This trick may not work real well for colorful 24-bit RGB maps, since 8-bit indexed color only has 256 colors.
___ You can save on TIFF file size by converting simpler color maps to indexed color, and black-and-white maps to grayscale. Both use 8-bit instead of 24-bit pixel values. This may also lessen RAM use and increase speed with Poser, but the author hasn't studied that issue yet.
___ If you have Poser 3.0.1, make sure to LZW-compress your TIFFs. There is a myth that LZW compression is lossy, but that is completely false. Even if it was slightly lossy, by the time Poser is done with a map, you probably couldn't tell the difference. Note, however, that LZW compression saves only disk space (big gobs of it), but won't help with RAM useage or rendering speed. (If by chance you're sending textures over a network, you might pick up some speed.)

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Screen shots
A screen shot (aka "screen grab" or "capture") can sometimes be a useful alternative to rasterizing. On any versions of Windows, press PrintScrn (or Alt-PrntScrn for just the active Window), which captures the screen to the Clipboard. On Macintosh, use the system screen grab. In an image editor such as Photoshop or Painter 3D, do a File/New. Photoshop will default to the size of an image waiting to be pasted, but Painter 3D has to be told the size manually (if in doubt, err large). Note that some image editors have to be told explicitly to use the system clipboard (instead of their own local clipboard) before you can paste a screen shot.
___ To get different resolutions, change the size of the object in the window, or even change screen resolution.

Using a screen shot of this template in Illustrator means getting to include the program's adjustable grid instead of having to manually create the grid lines for rasterized export, such as was done with the two templates at the top of the page (grid8x8 and cubewrap). The Stroke (line) Weight here is 0.1 point.

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Doing vector art
Most drawing programs default to inches or metric units. Turn on the ruler and try other units such as picas and points. If you have them, they may prove handier. For instance, there are 12 points in a pica, which you can use as the equivalent of 12 inches in a foot.
___ Sometimes one unit system will work better than another for a particular task. For instance, to break one inch (equals six picas equals 72 points) into even twelfths, you can either work in 0.0833-inch or 6-point increments.

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Revised: 16 Jun 99
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