Here is the next version of "James". As you can see, there is a second character
(the Diego-Version of Poser 8 Ryan), a ball of wool and Ariadnes thread within a
cretan ground labyrinth. So Theseus task is a little bit pointless, since first
he could easily reach the minotaur directly, and second, the labyrinth has only
one path, no thread needed... And he has lost his club...

With Baking occlusion maps the main problem with Poser figures is that they
consist of more than one mesh and one has to bake the maps one after the other
for every mesh involved against the union of all meshes in an animated sequence.
The ball of wool is not from Poser and my own creation but shows the same
difficulty. Most problems derived from Diego's dynamic hair. PoseRay converts
the lines to tubes but gives only one mesh with all the tubes (hairs). The
uv-maps are overlapping heavily. This is o.k. for simply applying an uv-mapped
texture but deadly for use of the mesh-camera since POV cannot find the actual
faces. So what to do? My decision was to analyse the tubes-group mesh and
isolate every single hair with a third party software, which is more suited to
such tasks. Here I had 5103 hairs and I had to rebuild every single hair
(vertex_vectors, normal_vectors, uv_vectors, face_indices and so on) from the
original PoseRay tubes-group. The programming of this task was done within an
hour, the time of computation was a little bit longer... (To address an other
thread I started some weeks ago: even with the possibility of having a kind of
readln-directive this would have been possible with POV, but I didn't dare to
calculate the parsing time needed. If FlyerX read this: For use of the mesh-cam
it would be fine to have a mesh for every single Poser-"line".) Of course I
could have baked occlusion maps for all 5103 hairs (and ended Christmas next
year). I decided to have only a quarter of the hairs by random due to the
special structure here. I wanted to model a kind of bronze statue, so only a
small amount of hairs were really needed.  The most of the original dynamic
hairs from Poser are overlapping and not needed, so I left them out. But some
hairs are still missing. So here is the next WIP of "baked" Poser-Figures (grass
by Gilles Tran - of course).

At last I think that the idea to apply occlusion map baking to Poser figures
were worth all the effort, but (naked) they are too smooth to yield good
results, even after having morphed Diego to a bodybuilder. Maybe I should place
the waiting Ariadne at the empty spot. She should have more not convex areas for
occlusion;-)

Best regards,
Michael

Post a reply to this message

Attachments:
Download 'labyrinth_pbi.png' (3655 KB)

Preview of image 'labyrinth_pbi.png'