This issue has interested me for a long time, as I've always been frustrated when characters are posed with some part of the soles of their feet visible that the area looks so blah and unrealistic. In the past I've always used the highly excellent (and free, and ancient) "P4 Remapped Female 2" by Chimeraware in these situations because it has a map for the sole of the foot, but that's sort of a hassle because among other things one has to make one's own skin texture maps for that model and then be very careful in assigning the several textures in the Surface Materials dialog. When I recently saw this old forum post I immediately downloaded Pangor's item from
Posette Forever. Unfortunately for whatever reason I could not get his mod to work, although it was probably something I did wrong.
While I was browsing the
Posette Forever forum yesterday, somewhere in here I found a great link to a site called drgeep that has a treasure trove of tutorials for
Poser 4. After looking at quite a few of those fine tutorials today I am amazed that I now know at least ten times more about how to use the program than I did before. Feeling ambitious with my new knowledge and with the foot issue fresh in my mind, I decided to see if I could modify a standard
Posette myself so that she would use a normal texture map except for the bottom of her feet, which would have their own texture. Although I was using tools within
Poser 4 I had never been brave enough to touch before, it turns out that it's not really that hard to accomplish giving the bottom of
Posette's feet their own texture. Since I thought there might be other people who would like to know how to do this for themselves, I decided to post a mini-tutorial on the subject. I apologize if this type of knowledge is commonplace for this forum, but like I said I just figured it out for myself--and I've been using
Poser on and off for so long that I bought my copy from Metacreations when they still owned the franchise.
The following directions are for
Poser 4; I don't know anything about how other versions work. For this procedure you will need
Poser 4 (of course), UV Mapper, one
Posette volunteer (make a backup just to be safe), and an image editing program (I use PaintShopPro) of which you have at least a basic understanding.
STEP ONE: Preparation
With
Poser 4 running, load the
Posette upon whom you plan to perform the enhancement. Using the main camera, center her in the screen. Turn off IK for both legs (on the Title Menu, go to Figure>Use Inverse Kinematics and see to it that no parts are checked) and then bend her hip -90 degrees using the hip parameter dial so the soles of her feet are facing you. Zoom in on the feet to get a good view. Set a camera dot, then move the camera around to some various positions and set camera dots so that you'll easily be able to jump around and get close-up views of
Posette's feet from all angles--I set a dot at the start position, from the left side, from the right side, looking down at the top of the foot from above the hip, and looking at the back of the heel from about 45 degrees. On the Document Display Style bar, change your display style to "Lit Wireframe." Since once we get started in the next step we're going to work on
Posette's left foot first, you might want to select her right shin and on the parameter dials bend it 90 degrees to give you an unobstructed view of the left foot in all your camera angles.
STEP TWO: Using the Grouping tool
For someone like myself who has always just used
Poser to pose characters and make scenes, this is the novel part that you may be apprehensive about. I had never really used the grouping tool much, but it turned out to be pretty simple.
Make
Posette's left foot the active body part as if you were getting ready to pose it, and then from your "Editing Tools" toolbar click on the Grouping Tool, which is the last button on the right. When you click on it, the Group Edit box will pop up. Click on "New Group" and a little box will pop up that says "Set Name" where you pick a name to call the group you're about to make. Type in whatever you want, I used "Left Foot."
Now comes the only semi-tedious part of the whole process, so it's probably a good thing that we can knock it out first and coast the rest of the way. You want to select all the polygons that make up the bottom of
Posette's foot. Move the cursor over to
Posette's left foot (notice that the cursor now looks like a plus sign) and click on a part of her foot (remember the toes are a separate body part that we'll get to later). When you click on a foot polygon, it turns red. This means you have selected the polygon to be part of the group you are making (in my case, "Left Foot"). In addition to clicking on each individual polygon to make it turn red, you can left-click and hold while moving your mouse to select large areas of polygons. It's ok at first to select some areas you don't want, because you can individually click on any polygon while holding the CTRL key to deselect it later.
What I did was click on my first camera dot I made in Step One to look straight at the soles of
Posette's feet. I clicked and dragged to make a box around the whole foot, selecting all of the foot polygons visible from that angle. Then I clicked on my next camera dot to move to the view from the left, and either clicked to add more polygons that are on the sole of her foot, or held CTRL while clicking to remove polygons that got selected in the first step but aren't actually on the sole of her foot. Since you are displaying the whole scene in the "Lit Wireframe" view, it should be fairly easy to see what parts of the foot are on the sole and which ones aren't. After you're satisfied from your current camera view that only parts on the soles of
Posette's feet are selected (red), move to another one of the camera views you set up beforehand to modify the selection area some more. Make sure you view the area from all angles, because anything that is red at the moment will have a foot bottom texture applied to it when we are all done.
Once you have selected all of the polygons that make up just the bottom of
Posette's Left Foot, go over to the "Group Edit" window. About two-thirds of the way down is a button that says "Assign Material." Click the Assign Material button and the "Set Name" box will pop up again so you can specify what this material will be called in the Surface Material editor later. Type in whatever name you want (I used "Foot Sole") and press enter. You'll want to write down exactly what name you just typed in, because you'll need to use that exact same material name when working on the other foot parts. You're now finished with the left foot.
Next we'll move on to
Posette's left toe bodypart. Either click somewhere on her left toe or select the bodypart from the dropdown menu at the bottom of the scene display. The Group Edit box will refresh since you're no longer working on the Left Foot bodypart. As you did when working on the Foot, select "New Group" and name it whatever you want (I picked "Left Toe"). Just like you did on the Foot, select all the polygons that make up the bottom of
Posette's Left Toe bodypart (which includes the ball of her foot and her actual toes). View the Left Toe area from all angles and keep selecting or deselecting polygons as you see fit until just the area that would be the bottom of her foot is selected/red. Once you've got the proper areas selected, move over to the Group Edit box and click on "Assign Material." When the "Set Name" box comes up, it's VERY important to type in exactly the same name that you typed in when assigning the material for the group you made on the Left Foot bodypart (I used "Foot Sole"). For example, if earlier when working on the Left Foot area you named the material for that group "gRoovY" then make sure you also name the Left Toe group's material "gRoovY" and not "groovy" or "GrOOVy." After assigning the material, you are now done with the Left Toe area.
Move on to right foot. If earlier you bent her right shin to get the right foot out of the way, go ahead and bend it back to zero now and then move the left foot out of the way, or even easier just go to the
Poser Title Menu and pick Figure>Symmetry>Swap Right and Left Legs. Then select the Right Foot, pick "New Group," select the appropriate polygons making sure to look at it from all angles, and assign the material for the group again naming it exactly the same thing you named the previous two materials (again, in my case I used "Foot Sole"). Once you're done with the Right Foot bodypart, repeat the process for the Right Toe bodypart.
Pat yourself on the back, take a coffee break and have a smoke, or whatever, you're now done with the hardest part of the entire process. If you haven't already done so several times, save your work as a .pz3 file right now in case you want to go back and change something later.
STEP THREE: Use UV Mapper to make a texture template map for the soles of
Posette's feet
While still in your
Poser scene, on the "Editing Tools" toolbar click any of the mundane editing tools like Rotate, Twist, or Translate/Pull to stop using the Grouping tool. Select
Posette's hip and use the parameter dial to bend it back to zero degrees so she's standing straight up from the ground just like she was when she started (also, if you bent her left shin while working on the right foot to get a better view, bend the shin back to zero now). Get your main camera back to a spot where you can get a good view of
Posette's whole body.
From the dropdown menus at the bottom of your main scene area, select your character's Body (as in the entire body, not one of the body parts). From the
Poser Title Menu, go to Window>Joint Editor. When you click on Joint Editor the "Joint Parameters" box will pop up. At the top of this box make sure "center" is selected from the pulldown menu, and then below that click on the button that says "Zero Figure." This is important because we're next going to export an obj copy of
Posette to use in UV Mapper, and want to be sure the texture map for the character we're currently working on will match up with the normal/default textures. Click on the X in the top corner of the Joint Parameters box to close it.
Next (with
Posette's "Body" still selected in the main display area) from the
Poser Title Menu select File>Export>Wavefront OBJ. A box will pop up that says "Export Range." If it doesn't already, just make sure "Single Frame" is your choice and press OK. Next a box will pop up that's called "Hierarchy Selection." This is where you specify what parts of the current scene you want the exported file to contain. Click the little box next to "Universe" so that every element of the scene is deselected, then click on the little box next to the name of the character you've been working on (might be Figure 1,
Posette,
Posy, etc) so that just the character's body parts have an X beside them. If there are any props attached to the figure (hair, jewelry, clothes) find them in the Hierarchy Selection box and deselect them (so there's no little x in the little box next to them). Once nothing except
Posette and her body parts are selected, click OK at the bottom of the Hierarchy Selection box. A save file dialog will pop up that should say "Export as Wavefront OBJ" at the top. Type in a filename for your export file--as long as it's not the name of an existing obj file it can be anything you want, we'll only need to use this export one time and then it can be deleted--and save it to an easily found spot on your hard drive. Yet another box will pop up next with a variety of export details. You only want to have two boxes checked, "Include existing groups in polygon groups" and "as Morph Target (no world transformations)." Make sure these two boxes are checked and everything else unchecked, then click OK. A little box will pop up that says "Exporting as obj" and disappear when the file is finished saving. In
Poser, go ahead and turn back on whatever document style you normally use (like texture shaded, whatever) unless of course you normally work in Lit Wireframe display mode.
Next we want to open up UV Mapper. I use what's now called "UV Mapper Classic" (it's free), so if you have "UV Mapper Pro" then you likely don't need to be following along with my instructions anyway because you're an expert and will know what to do. On the UV Mapper title menu, go to File>Load Model and open up the obj file we exported from
Poser a moment ago. A box with a jumble of numbers will pop up, but none of it is important to us right now so just click OK. A wireframe
Posette texture template will appear in the UV Mapper window. If it doesn't look almost identical to a normal blank P4 nude female texture map, you did something wrong when exporting the obj from
Poser so go back and try again.
Now we're going to make a template that we can use to give the bottoms of
Posette's feet their own texture. On the UV Mapper Title menu, choose Edit>Select>All. Then press the [ or left bracket key on your keyboard (on the UV Mapper Hot Keys helper, this is called "Hide Selected Facets"). The UV Mapper window should go blank since everything is hidden. Next from the UV Mapper Title Menu go to Edit>Select>By Material and in the "Select by Material" box that pops up find whatever you called the common material that we gave to each group on each bodypart making up the sole of
Posette's foot (if you used my names then you want to pick "Foot Sole"). When the material name (e.g. "Foot Sole") is highlighted, click OK (if you don't see your name of the material here, you messed up somewhere in step two so try again). A box should appear in the bottom left corner of the UV Mapper window indicating that we have selected the area on the texture map representing the bottom of the feet--except the box is empty! That's ok, on your keyboard press the ] or right bracket key and two wireframe feet will appear. Go again to the UV Mapper Title Menu and pick Edit>Select>None. The feet should remain in the corner of the screen, but the box around them will disappear.
We're almost done with UV Mapper. On the Title Menu click on File>Save Texture Map and a box will pop up called "BMP Export Options." For bitmap size, pick whatever you want but it should probably be at least 900x900 or 1000x1000 if you hope to make a decent texture map later. There are three checkboxes, you want to be sure "Exclude Hidden Facets" has a check next to it (so that only the foot sole area will be on the saved texture map) and the others are not checked. Click OK and save the file to wherever you normally work on graphics projects. We're now done with UV Mapper, go ahead and exit the program.
STEP FOUR: Paint a texture resembling the soles of a foot on your new texture template
In this step we will make the actual texture that will appear on the bottom of
Posette's feet in our
Poser renders. While I went into great detail describing each little step while we were using
Poser and UV Mapper since the things we were doing with those programs might be obscure to the average
Poser user
(Wait! You mean you can actually put clothes on these babes? Wow!) 
I'm going to presume you have at least a decent grasp of how to make a texture (after all, this is a graphics forum). Since I use PaintShopPro, I'll give the basic steps one would use with that program.
First of course you should decide whether you just want to slap some paint on for the texture or if you would like it to be more detailed. I chose to browse the vast archive of pron on my hard drive and find a decent resolution photo including the sole of a woman's foot. I made a freehand selection of the area with the sole of the foot from the image and copied it to my clipboard.
Next, using your graphics program open up the texture template file we saved using UV Mapper in the last step. You should see a large empty area with some wireframe feet in the bottom left corner. If you don't see this or see something else, you messed up with UV Mapper so try Step Three again.
If you followed my example and found a photo of a foot, paste your photo foot selection as a new layer onto this texture map, move it so it's over one of the wireframe feet, and transform/deform it until it mostly fits onto the wireframe; any part of the photo outside the wireframe won't appear on
Posette, but you can use a clone brush to cover any parts of the wireframe still visible for that foot. Duplicate the photo layer, mirror it, and then move the photo area of the third layer until it mostly fits onto the second wireframe foot (use a clone brush to fill in gaps as needed).
If you didn't have a photo to work with or just wanted to do some painting, make a new layer, break out the paint brush, pick a lighter and a darker skin tone color and cover the ends (toe and heel area) of the wireframe feet with the darker skin tone and the middle (arch area) with the lighter skin tone. Soften the borders between the colors with a soften brush or blend them with a soft eraser, or both, however you prefer.
Save your image file as a .jpg or .tiff under a different name so you'll still have your template to work with another time. With PaintShopPro there's no need to merge the layers before saving as a .jpg or .tiff, but if you're using another program you might need to merge the layers before saving as one of those types. For purposes of our example, let's save the painted texture file as "footpic.tiff." Although you'll likely want to come back later to refine your texture, for now we're finished with the image editing program so you can exit.
STEP FIVE: Apply the texture you made to
Posette so she'll have some soles on her feet
Go to
Poser 4 and load up the .pz3 file you've been working with throughout this procedure (if it's not already open). From the Title Menu go to Render>Materials to bring up the Surface Material box. Make sure
Posette has your favorite skin texture on, and then with her listed as the Object in the box at the top, verify that "Texture changes apply to entire figure" is not checked. Now in the Material pulldown menu at the top, find the new material somewhere on the list called--whatever you named your material way back when we were first making groups in
Poser (I had made mine called "Foot Sole"). Select this material, and then in the "Texture Map" portion of the surface material dialogue pick "Load" and load the finished texture map you made in Step Four (which I had called footpic.tiff). In the "Object Color" box with the "Foot Sole" material selected, pick white or a very light pink for any characters no matter what their racial profile (unless your
Posette is an alien with green skin or something, in which case you would want to pick a very light green color). Click OK on the bottom of the surface material dialogue to finish up.
The moment of truth has arrived, when you can finally enjoy all your hard work. Either pose your
Posette into a position where the bottom of one or both her feet are visible, or if you're impatient just select her hip and on the parameter dial bend it to -90 degrees so her soles are facing you.
You should see something resembling the soles of feet on
Posette depending on how detailed you made your texture map in Step Four. Render the scene to see how good a job you did in fact do. Save your .pz3 and, unless you were doing this whole thing as a skill exercise, save your new character to your character library. You can also delete the obj file we exported from
Poser in step three as you will never need to use it again. From now on your
Posette will never have to be embarrassed about wearing a pair of sandals again.
AFTERWARD: If it doesn't work
What if after all that work your
Posette does not have nice new normal looking feet? Since you could not have completed step four if you messed up too badly in steps one, two, or three, the problem is likely in step four or five. There are three possibilities:
a) You did a really, really bad job on making the texture map in step four. Try that step again.
b) You didn't properly apply the texture map to
Posette in Step Five. In the surface material dialogue, make sure that the Foot Sole material has the texture map you made in step four (e.g. footpic.tiff) applied, but that the rest of
Posette has a different regular texture map applied (e.g. vickybusterp4.jpg or whatever). If "Texture changes apply to entire figure" was checkmarked when you applied either texture it's never going to work out so uncheck that option.
c) You have a dark or weird Object Color set for the Foot Sole material. Go back, set the color to white or a very light pink, and set the highlight, ambient, and reflective colors to black.
Actually there is one other possibility. You could have really messed up on step two and either only picked one or two polygons for each group we made or selected large areas of the foot that are not on the bottom for each group, and then somehow didn't notice that the texture template you made in step three and worked with in step four in no way resembled a pair of wireframe feet. In this case unfortunately you should go all the way back to step two and try the whole project over again.
I hope someone out there will find the above outline helpful. Hopefully it wasn't too pedantic, but I tried to imagine what kind of level of detail I would have needed before I figured out how to do any of this.
Endosphere
