Morphography tutorials

Tiling Texture Maps in Poser

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• Introduction

Imagine that you want to cover a surface with a repeating pattern - wallpaper, say, or a tiled floor. In many 3D applications, including Poser 5 and 6, you can set textures to be tiled automatically, so you need only a small texture which is repeated by the renderer. This obviously saves memory, but it's also easier to adjust the scale of things like brickwork so that they look right.

Earlier versions of Poser have no such facility - you have to create a ready tiled texture in an image editing program. However, there is a way to re-map an object so that any texture applied to it will be tiled for a fixed number of repeats. This method was originally posted by Steve Cox, the author of UVmapper, but it isn't universally known.

• What to do

For this example, I'm making a simple plane which can be used as a floor, wall or ceiling. Open up UVmapper (see the Utilities page for details), and load the Poser groundplane prop which is
Runtime\Geometries\props\ground20x20Lines.obj.
Select the whole object from the Edit menu, or press Ctrl-A.



Now, press the asterisk key on your numeric keypad. Each time you press, it increases the map by a factor of two in each direction. In other words, press once for a 2 x 2 tile, twice for 4 x 4, three times for 8 x 8 and so on. You can see that only powers of two are possible with this method, but that isn't usually a problem since you can scale the object in Poser.

Here, we see the UVmapper window after pressing once.



The squares are now twice as big: technically the UV coordinates have "wrapped round" so that the texture will be repeated. Once you have the tiling level that you want, press the Home key if necessary to align the map with the top left corner. All that remains is to save the plane (with a new name!) and import into Poser. Save it to your props library to keep it handy for future use.

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