Why Purchased Texture Sets for Poser Are Inherently Flawed

A lot of the characters and texture sets you can buy or download for Victoria 4 (one of the most popular figures used in Poser) or any other figure, look really good in their promotional images. They look really great until you go in for a close up and see things that are strange and ugly. In this article I'll explain why this happens and what could be done to remedy the situation.

It happens all the time, you buy or download what you think is a really awesome texture set for Victoria or some other model, you apply the materials you got, and then you see the results. You see white bumps that look like bad acne or eczema in various places. The lips and nipples are especially susceptible to this kind of effect, but you can see it on almost any body part, with nearly every texture you can get.

This acne and eczema effect is caused by something called "baked-on specular." What that means is there are highlights already painted onto the texture you got. The texture you bought or found was created by using existing images of skin from a photograph of someone. This sounds like a really great idea until you really think about it from a rendering perspective. 3D rendering programs are designed to create highlights on models under the lighting conditions you tell it to use. The highlights that are already there on the texture wind up in your 3D render no matter what lighting you decide to use. Think about that for a moment. You were going for more realism, so you got some really high resolution textures and you wind up destroying the realism with out of place highlights.

This is only the beginning of the problem though. Most good texture sets also come with a bump map for your model. This tells your 3d program where to put bumps, dimples, and other raised areas on your model. If you've read my other articles on 3D texturing you will remember that a bump map is a greyscale image. Well, most texture artists seem to think that turning their high resolution texture into a greyscale will solve the need for a bump map. The problems arise when Poser sees the highlights I already mentioned. In a greyscaled image map they would still be bright white, and bright white areas on a bump map tell your 3D program to raise the area. In other words, the lip gloss highlights on your texture map get turned into bumps and look like extremely chapped lips.

It doesn't even end there either. Often times, a texture set comes with a displacement map, a specular map, a reflection map, and possibly others as well. For every map that the artist created with the original texture, the problem propagates. The same type of phenomena happens when shadowing is left on the texture.

In order to solve this problem, texture artists need to start re-thinking how they make textures. A color map should be used only for color variations, and should not have any highlights or shadows on it at all. All the other maps you might create should not be just a greyscaled version of the original color map, they should be created with the same care and attention to detail that you put into the color map. I for one, don't want an odd dimple in my figure because you forgot to remove a freckle from the bump map when you greyscaled your color map and called it good. If I wanted to do that I'd just tell poser to greyscale the color map and not even bother with the extra 10mb that your bump map loads onto my computer. Yes, Poser can do this and many other effects.

To sum all this up: A color map is only for color variations, Poser and other 3D programs are quite good at placing shadows and highlights. Try to remember also that skin doesn't really change color with as much variance as I have seen on dozens of textures. Bump maps should be created independently of the color map and should definitely not have color variations on them, just bumps. In other words, remember that a bump map shouldn't have freckles on it, and moles should be brighter. All the other maps that you may or may not include with your texture set should be treated the same way. Remember what the maps are for, and your creations will soar above the rest.