♥ PosetteForever ♥

There are many, many fun models in PMX format, meant for MMD engine and mostly free. Along with prior PMD, and props' .X, MMD began as a way to pose and animate low-ish poly Anime figures, have them prance, dance and lip-synch.

Then, people began 'porting' console game scenes / sets etc, and the flood-gates opened...

Poser cannot read PMX, PMD or X files as-is. Happily, the free 'PMX Editor', found on DA, can export those to OBJ+MTL. There are, of course, a bunch of 'gotchas'.

MMD files for any model or texture flagged as 'TDA' may not be 'ported', as copyright owner found his work rudely pirated across 'Second Life', swung a very broad legal hammer: Do NOT go there...

MMD axis convention is reversed L/R so, if that matters, you must 'mirror' prior to export from PMX Editor, or at import to Poser.

MMD often uses 'Alpha' channel of PNG or TGA textures as a transparency mask. As yet, Poser does not seem to recognise such, 'out of the box'. You must extract or craft, hand apply.

PMX files seem to contain equivalent of Poser's PP2 / CR2 and MAT files, are able to scale and position textures. Unfortunately, this information does not seem to be exported to 'basic' MTL.

Which is what's happened here. But, after some hair-tearing iteration, I found the 'magic' switch in Poser's 'Advanced' materials to correct it...

This free 'Sky Island' is the 'Isle of Songs', ported from Nintendo, 'Skyward Song'.
https://www.deviantart.com/julehyru...MD-DL-899413113

There's a 'missing' texture, but it is not important, as left-over call when original re-named.

As PMX file disagreed with my ($$) 3DOC, I used the PMX Editor route. OBJ imported to Poser at 100% of original scale as a very big object, very high in the sky. After several attempt to find it, I deleted and re-imported with 'place on ground' set. Took a while, but I found that ~3% scale looked good.

One glance at preview showed that eg rails and ivy needed transparency masks. Their TGA textures held such in the Alpha channel. I used free Irfan View to extract, export...

Then I came to the two plinths with 'owlish' faces. They had their texture, auto-applied by the MTL. But, they showed as black. I tried mirroring texture etc, only got white or streaky grays. Finally, I went through the texture's many 'Advanced', tried them methodically.

Finally solved by setting 'V-Scale' to -1.

{ Shrug... }

As you can see from transparency mapped 'plant' in foreground, there's much still to do. But, hey, I've learned a new trick...

Here's how it began...


This is the texture, as supplied (converted to JPG) and it does look like 'Kilroy Was Here'.


And here's the 'solved', at least for this...

I made transparency maps for those greens, then went around creating grey-scale bump maps for all the stone carvings, ticked their 'displacement' box. IIRC, brighter extrudes or intrudes (if negative scaling) further, with dark less and black default, 'no offset'.

I tried to augment the 'floor stones' thus, can't see any difference...

Adding a 'gotcha' to that 'V-Scale' thing, yes, bump-map needs it setting, too. And, probably, any transparency and/or ambient / glow map likewise...

This render has subdivision option upped from default 1 to 2. I tried three, it looked 'eroded'...



FWIW, I'm no gamer: On the console, do you need to set a combination or something by re-positioning those plinths to lower the 'small' island & walkway to reveal a door into larger ??

:wink: :thumb: Thank you very much Nik! That looks nice, & highly appreciate the info :friends: ! I haven't played video games (not even on the phone) for years, so, I don't know about the door :dontknow: