CyberRaks: Costume and Poses

Six More Outfits

The creative minds behind RPD Styling (RenaPD) and Dee's Den (Deecee) think very differently about costuming styles, if their belly dance costume offerings are any indicator. But the results of their different approaches are beautiful, and the Dee's Den package is easily worth its cost. The sidebar in the discussion of the RPD Styling textures below highlights a peculiar flaw in them which reduces their suitablity for detailed renders. At only about $15, these textures are also a bargain, nonetheless.

All six textures are built on photographic data, but while the emphasis in the Dee's Den offerings is fabrics, color, and weaving, the RPD textures emphasize metal, reflection, and transparency.

This review includes comparison "flip charts" that illustrate all seven textures. Just click on the buttons (not the names) to flip though the display. The entire page is graphics heavy as a result of the charts, so be patient while we load.

Let's Look at 'em

There's no better way to evaluate a texture than to look at it, so use the flip chart below to see all seven textures (the original Victoria's Fantasy Dancer Costume texture pak, plus three each for the Belly Dancer Mappak and the RPD Bellydancer Mappak. And yes, the two packages spell "belly dancer" differently). They are modelled by Mary Dell's Deirdre, with a camera angle that highlights some significant details of the costume texturing. As you flip through the pictures, notice the elements like gems and brocade on the bra cups, the raised patterns on the choker and cuff, and the effects of transparency and reflection on the sleeve and pantleg. There are also examples of the gilt chain visible at her waist in each picture.

Ye Dunna 'Ave To Be 'Gyptian

The first chart showcases Deirdre a V2 character by Mary Dell. Deirdre is a character and texture of Irish origin, as her name implies, and comes with an adult body, modifications for the two Millenium Girls, textures, and even some customized clothing. Charming character, she, if you are looking for a lovely, ordinary woman rather than a supermodel. The illustration shows Digiport Pose 23.

We Request Your Indulgence The images in the flip charts are about 20k each, so they take a while to load. The image window goes black while the image is loading the first time. Once they are all loaded, you can flip through them quickly. Note:: If the graphic goes black when you click a button, wait a moment. Lots of stuff to load.... Original Texture (VFDC)  Original VFDC Purple texture. Belly Dancer Mappak  Dee's Den Green texture.  Dee's Den Red texture.  Dee's Den Blue texture. RPD Bellydancer Mappak  RPD Styling Black texture.  RPD Styling Orange texture.  RPD Styling Silver texture.

Belly Dancer Mappak

The Belly Dancer Mappak, from Dee's Den, was offered at DAZ3D simultaneously with the introduction of the VFDC. The textures, now available at RuntimeDNA, are by Denise Tyler (author of Practical Poser). They provide three additional costume themes, essentially Red, Green, and Blue/purple.

The Dee's Den Belly Dancer Mappak. Shown here: Detail of Red Top, Veil.

Green
The Green is my favorite of this set and perhaps of all seven. It features what appear to be photographic reproductions of fabric completely covered with sequins. (Note: The details shown here are degraded by successive jpeg compression; although the textures are jpegs, the originals are much crisper than these images show. The images are just meant to give you an idea of the detailing in the texture.) The sequin effect is most pronounced with the bra (the first detail inset on the left). The loincloth (second inset) also is spectacular, featuring a delicately woven pattern at the top and a sculptured cord for the fall that looks almost like American Indian beadwork. Beautiful transparencies complement the solid areas. The solid gold stripes in the sheer pant legs are gorgeous. If I could only keep one outfit of the seven total, this would be my choice.

Red
The Red is lightly detailed with sequins and hemmed with gold cord. The sequins don't glitter quite as much as one might hope in a standard render. I expect there are ways to bring them up with reflection and transparency tweaking, but the render illustrated above is as the MAT installs them. (Tech note: I am using 300 DPI and about a 400x400 window, and saving to TIFF, then saving as 25% compressed jpegs.) Raw brown macramé cord highlights the upper pant legs, and a gold pattern that almost appears to be a repeated solid metal motif accents the choker and body bands. The second inset shows the pattern on the bra, the first, part of an arm wrap. The bases for the textures all appear to be photographs.

Blue
The Blue is the gaudiest of the three, in my opinion, and the most ambitious. The loincloth and bra have huge zircons anchoring tassels (the first inset shows a zircon and tassel on the bra); the effect is pretty much lost in the renders unless you go to huge sizes. The stones particularly needed a bump map to make them work in what I consider "normal" sizes (maximum 800x600, 150DPI), I think. However, the patterned color on the pant leg and arm wrap (second inset) comes through the render beautifully. Compare the precise lines of that pattern with the swirls of color on the red and green textures.

To test the texture's capacity for high quality renders, I rendered the bra zircon at 1200X1200, 1200DPI (that may be larger than lifesize...). The popup window will display a portion of the result. I reduced the TIFF to 70% of its original size and saved it as a 1% compressed jpeg file (320k). There is a certain amount of blurring in the image that I find distracting. I guess my point is that mapping photographic textures onto clothing/body surfaces is not the best strategy for creating this sort of texture. The zircon survives better than the gold-mounted turquoises on the RPD Styling Black costume (below), but neither comes out of a large render looking like reality.

This is not to knock the textures, by any means. They are gorgeous, and if what you are doing is building scenes, the level of detail I am talking about is lost anyway, just as it would be in a photograph or painting. Lost, wasted, or never even tried for.

Stephanie Does Dancing

The second chart features DAZ3D's Stephanie. Here she is "buffed up" a bit (she is more athletic than Victoria), with the Dionne texture (free at Renderosity) by Daio, author of the beautiful Celtic Jewels and Lace Jewels fantasy textures for sale at Renderosity. The Stephanie illustration uses Digiport Pose 21.

We Request Your Indulgence The image window goes black while the image is loading the first time. Original Texture  Original Purple. Dee's Den Mappak  Dee's Den Green.  Dee's Den Red.  Dee's Den Blue. RPD Mappak  RPD Black.  RPD Orange.  RPD Silver.

RPD Bellydancer Mappak

The RPD Bellydancer Mappak, from RenaPD, has a peculiar production flaw that reduces their usefulness a bit. They were built on UV maps that distort the patterns when they are applied. Nevertheless, they are so beautiful that they are worth having, especially if you have the necessary graphics skills to fix the problem. (The problem and the fix are discussed at the bottom of this page.) This mappak has some pretty spectacular effects in it.

The RPD Styling Bellydancer Mappak. Shown here: Detail of Black Top, Veil.

Again there are three textures, this time Black, Orange, and Silver.

Black

The theme for the RPD Styling Black is gold and turquoise (which is French for "Turkish," in case you are wondering what Navajo jewelry has to do with belly dancing). The combination is a classic elegant look, and while the Dee's Den Green may be my sentimental favorite, this black outfit is hands down the most beautiful. The insets show one of the large stones mounted on the loincloth and, in the second, the gold foil of the anklets. In sum, I bought the Dee's Den mappak for all three outfits; I'd have purchased this one just to get the Black. Dazzling! Combined with the Stephanie model and Daio's free Dione suntan (See second flip chart, below), the result is gorgeous.

Orange

Orange features antique gold brocade, a citrusy color scheme of yellows and greens, and huge topaz gems. The combination gaudy and colorful, like the Blue theme from Dee's Den. The insets illustrate the detailing in the antique gold accents, largely lost in renders through the distortion across a 3D surface, and (second inset) one of the topazes from an arm wrap. The veil is especially striking, with its geometric patterns.

Silver

The Silver color scheme — silver, white, and red stones — is not one that appeals to me personally, but as you can see from the insets, it is beautifully detailed and has potential to create gorgeous images. The insets illustrate the contrast of the ametheyst stones against the white and silver base and some intricate Celtic designs that repeat the ametheyst color.

Unfortunately, the UV mapping problem is at its worst here, precisely because the details are so vivid. As you can see in the second flip chart, above, the reddish stones render as reasonably oval stones on the arm wrap and pants, but as blurry streaks on the loincloth right next to the pant leg. In small-scale renders, this might not be unacceptable, but the third inset, right, illustrates what it could look like with a properly proportioned texture map (one I threw together for this illustration). The textures are usable as shipped, but if you want the gemstones to look more realistic, I have described how to fix them at the bottom of the page. Once the proportions are corrected, the result is be a costume of lovely delicacy, almost like lace.

To conclude the examination of the RPD Styling Bellydancer mappak, I have to give it a regretful second place to the other mappak because of the flaw in the proportions of the textures. Otherwise, I consider the two paks virtually equal in value, and for me at least the Black theme was worth the price, even though I have had to modify it. The Black is a magnificent ensemble, and both the Orange and the Silver grow on you.

The Pitfalls of Photographic Texture

Finally, a general comment about using photographic images to create textures. A Poser texture is elastic. That is inherent in the technology, which changes shapes by stretching them. When a gemstone is placed on the body in an area that can shrink and stretch, the stone, not surprisingly, shrinks and stretches. If you look closely at the renders, you can see these distortions, even in such small images. Especially noticeable is the "smearing" effect at the outside tops of the pantlegs. This can't be avoided, at least not without enormous difficulty, so pointing it out is not to fault Dee's Den or RPD Styling.

After conversations with renapd, I'm convinced now that the problem with the RPD textures is directly related to this characteristic of texture mapping. A texture is a "skin." If your skin gets bigger (lay off the potato chips, or it will), your moles get bigger. When Superman flexes his spandexed biceps, the "Made in USA" logo stretches with the blue fabric. But decorative gems don't work that way in the real world. And UV mapping, the basic principle of "skins," doesn't allow for this problem. This is why the UV map must be matched to an obj file. Without that obj file, the texture is simply crushed to fit the existing object, as happened with the RPD textures. Even with the appropriate obj file, everything on the "skin" will stretch and contract as the skin stretches and contracts, whether the skin is meant to be spandex or gold plate.

This problem is addressed by dynamic clothing. It's tragic that this costume hasn't been updated to new technology and models. Fitting it to V3 is a nightmare, and so many of its more complicated demands on Poser could be eliminated by making the fabrics dynamic. Unfortunately, the shelf-life of a Poser product, I'm told, is about a week, and these items are hoary at multi-years old.

The Rest of the Story

The mappaks provide beautiful variety to the VFDC, and their photographic details can be used to create your own (not-distributable) textures. They can also be used to extend the costume variations by applying elements of them to other clothing items from the basic Victoria clothing pak, as I have done to create a bikini that replaces the loincloth, shown in my review of the Digiport poses. Similarly Daio's Celtic Jewels and Lace Jewels (available at the Renderosity Marketplace) could be used to build authentic belly dance costumes, with or without the Victoria Changing Fantasy Set of armor the textures were designed for. Her "body jewels," like the belly dance textures, provide three color schemes per kit.

Well, then. All dressed up and ready to dance. That brings us to the crown jewel of the set, the Digiport pose collection, subject of the next page of this review. Note: Page 3 loads nearly a meg of graphics to illustrate all the poses. Please be patient if you are on a low/medium bandwidth connection.

• Victoria's Fantasy Dancer Costume
• The DAZ3D Belly Dancer Mappaks
• The DAZ3D Belly Dancer Pose Kit

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