"Mike Williams" <nos### [at] econymdemoncouk> wrote in message
news:t7n### [at] econymdemoncouk...
<snip>
> Good luck. I reckon that the Poser manual is pretty good at covering a
> difficult subject, but if you can do better then I look forward to it.

Thanks :-) I've gotta knack for communicating things like this.

> Obviously, the manual omits details of techniques that illegally
> "borrow" the geometry of proprietary figure models to use as the basis
> for clothes models.

It isn't illegal to create derivitive works from another work of art and
sell it so long as it is clearly distinguishible from the original. Here is
some supporting text from
http://www.copyright.gov/circs/circ40.pdf

"A 'useful article' is an article having an intrinsic utilitar-ian function
that is not merely to portray the appearance of the article or to convey
information. Examples are clothing, furniture, machinery, dinnerware, and
lighting fixtures. An article that is normally part of a useful article may
itself be a useful article, for example, an ornamental wheel cover on a
vehicle.

"Copyright does not protect the mechanical or utilitarian aspects of such
works of craftsmanship. It may, however, protect any pictorial, graphic, or
sculptural authorship that can be identified separately from the utilitarian
aspects of an object. Thus, a useful article may have both copyrightable and
uncopyrightable features. For example, a carving on the back of a chair or a
floral relief design on silver flatware could be protected by copyright, but
the design of the chair or flatware itself could not."

ALSO

"Copyright in a work that portrays a useful article extends only to the
artistic expression of the author of the pictorial, graphic, or sculptural
work. It does not extend to the design of the article that is portrayed. For
example, a drawing or photo-graph of an automobile or a dress design may be
copyrighted, but that does not give the artist or photographer the exclusive
right to make automobiles or dresses of the same design."

<snip>
> >Sure, but does this work with specular highlights as well, or do those
just
> >come out looking like clear plastic?
>
> P5 allows complete invisibility.
>
> In Poser-4 transparent objects with specularity looked like clear
> plastic, because you couldn't create a specularity map. Poser-5 has a
> fully functional node-based shader system, so you can simply create a
> link from Specular_Value to the image_map node you're using for
> transparency to use it as a specularity map, and the clear plastic bits
> will become completely invisible.

Cool! What about collisions?

> If your clothes use Reflection, Refraction, Alternate_diffuse or
> Alternate_Specular then you'll need to use the same method to switch
> those features off in the transparent region.
>
> When you import the mesh into POV-Ray, you need to ensure that there's
> no specularity in that half of the texture_map. (Works with Poser-4 as
> well as Poser-5).
>
>  pigment_pattern {image_map {jpeg "transmap.jpg" interpolate 2}}
>   texture_map {
>      [0 texture {pigment {rgbt <0,0,0,1>}}]
>      [1 texture {My_Specular_Texture}]
>   }

Thanks for the code!!

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