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So how could I best absorb and retain the abundance of experience presented in front of me? Honestly, I don’t think it’s possible. I kept going back to my grandpa asking me how I could eat an elephant. Nobody would expect me to eat the whole thing in one sitting; that’s crazy talk. But if I were to pace myself and realize I’m going to be at it for a long time, I could go about my business: one bite at a time.

One of the brightest ideas that we came up with. After realizing Photo shop CS3 Extended has some new 3D capabilities, I wanted to play around.

We use Poser 7  occasionally in my friends shop to find great camera and lighting angles on the human form. Instead of bending around a hardwood manikin to look for figure positions, we’re able to adjust a virtual body joint by joint.

So why not send over that 3D file from Poser and open it up with the new Photo shop. There are other ways to change and edit the textures on three dimensional forms, but what imaging tool is more powerful than Photo shop? If I can mess with the texture – even add some tattoos – and the program with lay it on the surface instantly, it could be a great visual reference tool.

After placing the default Male figure (G2 Simon) within Poser 7, I posed him around in a mid-walking position. I want to place an image on his right arm, so I tried to adjust the lighting accordingly. Once finished, it was a matter of exporting the figure -minus the ground- as a Wavefront.OBJ file (3D vector file) then closing Poser to free up memory.

In Photo shop CS3 Extended, I created a New Document with US Paper settings. (8.5×11, 300dpi) and created a new 3D Layer in it.

Layer > 3D Layers > New Layer from 3D File…

Clicking the drop down box next to “Files of type:”, I selected an Alias|Wavefront (*.OBJ) file. Then, I opened the file Poser exported.

My workstation is an older dual processor Dell Precision with 2.5GB of RAM. I was worried it would take awhile to render, but Rendering all 82,000 polygons took about 45 seconds. It’s way longer than working with a standard image, but still not that bad

The figure is brought in as its own layer with whatever Texture attributes Poser gave to it.

To put a tattoo on the body, I just double clicked on the Body Texture. (In this case, the Simon Body Tex layer) Photo shop opens up the texture as a new image. Any addition or editing is applied onto the three dimensional shape as soon as the texture is saved.

(Poser didn’t send over the texture file in the Export. So I pulled open the SimonG2 texture and resized Photoshop’s to fit.)

Time to bring out the tattoo idea. I made a detailed ink sketch  of part elbow joint and part arm anatomy. I combined the two where I thought they’d fit and messed around with it.

Then I pulled that sketch into the texture file. It took some resizing, rotating, and tweaking. Finally, I set the Blending Mode to Multiply so the skin would be revealed and saved the texture file.

About 2 minutes layer Photo shop was done rendering. Then, it took a few tries get the sizing and placement close. Simply adjusting the sketch layer over the skin texture gave plenty of options to get it right.

You can’t move any part of the guy around (that’s what we used Poser for), but you can move the camera to your liking. Double clicking on the tiny cube icon (in the Layers palette) gives me 3D controls. Which give me the ability to move and rotate to find a better view.

Here’s three views, saved and pieced together.

In Poser, we can alter the shape and size of whatever body part we want – you know, to match the size of our lovely tattoo collector. I think this would be quicker and more powerful if I had a 3D form of individual body parts to work with, instead of the entire human form. I’m sure somebody has some good Lightwave or Maya figures out there…

Again, rendering is a different ballgame when it comes to time spent working. I’m not used to waiting, so the hurry up and wait take some patience. But if I get the process down and get to the point where I can save my own templates, I’m sure this will get some use. Now if I have a big project that I am working on this will help with all types of muscle tone and body features.

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