Would just like a feel for whether people prefer default texture paths be left in a cr2 for morph distribution, or do you prefer no textures be loaded? Beth

no textures....cause I may not be using the texture you are....:>)

Not only do you not need the textures for morph distribution, You do not need the whole figure section, Nor the actors section, Nor the geometry calls' Nor any groups in channels that are not having your new morphs, Nor any channels except your new morphs in the actors that are carrying the morphs, Nor any of the formating for the actors in channels except actor ____ { channels { } } Just the version header and the main brackets. If you add a section for actor BODY and name the file *.pz2, you can supply the FBM dials in it.

OK, Jaager, you are trying to confuse me. ;) I realize the textures are not needed to distribute the morphs. I do not wish to distribute them. I simply wanted to know if people prefer the texture which is referenced in the cr2, when they bought the product, to be referenced in the morph cr2. For example, I have the Petals clothing for the Mil Girls. When you purchase and install it, it loads with textures. This is how it comes "out of the box". I also want the cr2 to be functional, without the person downloading needing to transfer the morphs or anything. Wouldn't leaving out all that stuff make it dysfunctional? Beth

Morph distribution - means to me, that the function of the file is to provide morphs to those who already have the figure. They have it textured and scaled as they wish and just wish to add in your additional morphs. In this case, the stripped file with just your morphs - is to be used as a donor file in MM4/MC, with their existing figure file as the recipient. If your file is meant to be a fully functioning CR2, then all that other stuff is needed. - Except you do not need a material section. Your problem here is that empty - the figure comes in color textured by Poser. If you have materials, you run into the problem of a user either not having the textures you assign, or they parked them in a different folder. Then you get the Poser - 'out to lunch' bit. It is the opposite of providing textures and MATposes for them. If a user does not have a MATpose for the setup they want, even if you provide the textures that your CR2 addresses, they have to get back to their previous set up the long way. If you go the way you aim to, you have to make some choice about textures, and you are duplicating morphs and other channels everyone with the figure already has. The user now has an additional CR2 for a figure they have at least one CR2 for already. What I am suggesting is - have them go the extra step and copy the morphs from a stripped carrier file. It avoids the texture problem altogether and is the least taxing option on bandwidth - there is no duplication of files in the lbrary.

Inject them. Find a rarely used morph and overwrite the deltas with injection (and note that it does this in the readme so no one gets confused). You can replace the deltas and the name of the channel with a pose, and this would be the smallest and most efficient way to do this. With V3 you don't even have to worry about finding a rarely used morph channel -- you can just use one of the open hidden numbered ones which are there for this exact purpose. A basic user than can simply apply the pose, and a more advanced user can hack the deltas into their own CR2 manually if they want to. Another good reason to do this sort of thing this way instead: I may have loaded up all sorts of morphs on my Mike already. If you distribute this as a CR2, I HAVE to hack in the channel to my CR2 to get everything. If you do it as an injection pose, I can at least try it out on my customised CR2 as long as I haven't removed any morphs, and decide if I even want to bother hacking it in, change the pose to usurp a different channel ID for it, or bin the whole thing.

Ok, guys, y'all are deviating from the question. First off, I don't think there are enough morph channels on the Petals clothing nor DAZ Mil Girls clothing pak to inject 25 plus or minus body morphs. I, personally, am not fond of injection for numerous morphs. The way I work, I find it time consuming. When I create a face, I like all face and body morphs available so I can see if they enhance the look or not. However, I think injection is great for single character creation or adding a small collection of morphs to a larger collection. And, though I know there are many people using Poser who are familiar with transferring morphs and hacking the cr2, there must surely be those who aren't or those who simply want the product ready to go as soon as it is installed and loaded in the Poser scene. Though, I am very familiar with both procedures, I do not wish to have to do either prior to use of a purchased product. I have created a lot of morphs for some clothing items. I wish to distribute the morphs via the cr2, and just wanted to know if people like the default/"out of the box" texture reference left as is, or if they prefer that no textures load. I have decided to take out texture map references. :) Beth

Dodger, that is the (as of now) ultimate method. In discussion here is a clothing figure - that may not may not even have morph channels to override. As I said already today, somewhere else, if you have finished character fitting morphs and intend them to be used solo, then having a batch of character fit injection poses - each using the same slot (because they are meant to be used in exclussion of any others) is about as lean as it gets. It is what I do with character morphs for the human figures - one slot - hundreds of different options for it. For the human factory shape CR2 files - I split the head from the body - as far as morphs are concerned. But for the Mil figures, it takes a lot of body morphs to equal one serious head morph in size. The same situation with V3 is off the scale- the head is so much larger.

Beth, Doing it your way, a user with some sophistication can always use your file in MM4 and copy the new morphs - and keep their textures. For the others, if they have MATposes, they can texture what you have done, with a single click. The only downside is the extras in your CR2 increase the file size.

If you expect a fair proportion of users to be doing renders with textures other than the out-of-the-box ones, then set up your cr2 to have all of the materials set to white with no textures. That way, Poser 4 users won't be cluttering up their memory with textures they aren't going to render when they load the cr2. OTOH If you think just about everybody will be rendering with the out-of-the-box textures and the out-of-the-box cr2 loads with the textures in place, then your cr2 might as well carry the same texture settings as the original. Just check that Poser hasn't added an absolute path statement, since those are always a bad idea. Personally, I'd rather have two cr2s sitting in the same folder than have a cr2 and a pose. It's much faster to load that way (load one cr2 vs load a cr2 then go hunting for the corresponding pose). My pose library would be severely overloaded even if I were to delete everything except injection poses. I can't find anything in there anymore without scrolling for a couple of days. Also, if there aren't any emptly channels to use, then most injections seem to overwrite something I didn't want overwritten.

I am struggling with volume of clothing MATposes, their ackward locations, and the strange logic behind texture locations. I approach the textures and the MATposes for them, from a focus on the item, not the author of the particular texture. It seems more organized to have a folder in textures = Clothing. In this folder would be a subfolder for each clothing item, with all of the textures for it. The MATposes also are pooled per item. In P5 a similar subfolder nesting can be used for the MATposes. This does not reduce the number of files, but it does make them easier to find. Having more than one Runtime, improves organization. It gets interesting when trying to do this, because many textures do not identify the item they are for and the MATposes seldom do. It is not difficult to find original zips they come from do not identify the clothing item they are for - either in the zip name, or in the included text file. The textures with names like "fabric" or "Dress" or "texture 1" have to be renamed to something unique to keep from overwriting files with the same name, if you can identify what they are for and try to pool them. Then there are the MATposes that are *.cm2 and pooling those(thank goodness for Rename.exe) The present system that is author based, is not workable, if it ever was.

Capsces :) while the guys argue about technical stuff .. I'd say if the model comes with a single texture, it should load with that. If it has mutliple variations, let it load white..and the User can go and apply the MAT that makes them happy. Lyrra

Well, we're getting away from Beth's question, but yes, I largely agree with you, Jaager. I used to keep my poses pretty well organised but I gave up after installing Vic 3. That was the killer for me. Now I don't go into the pose library if I can possibly avoid it, and if I do then I find what I want using P3DO so I can go straight to it in Poser. I do see some advantages to an author based filing system though - at install time anyway. It means that when I install something I know right away where to look for it and I can move it if I want. With a subject based system, I can just imagine installing a hair figure and then having to look for directories called hair, conforming hair, poseable hair, articulated hair and of course, everything from Abigail hair to Zoe hair. Also, I think proliferation of texture directories would be pretty nasty under a subject based system. Instead of having one directory for each author you buy/download from, you'd wind up with one for almost every author-subject permutation as each author makes up their own name for the subject. If we had some sort of enforceable standard file placement system, then a subject based system would be excellent, but we can't even get everybody to agree to give their MAT poses the same file extension or give their textures names that have some chance of being unique, so how could we get them to all use the same directory structure? It seems to me that the only way we'll ever get a decent solution to managing the vast amounts of content most of us collect is if it comes from the software itself. P5's nested directories are a good start, but nothing like a full solution. I'll be very interested to see what steps DAZ takes to tackle file management in DAZ Studio. It's supposed to be one of the issues they plan to take on. I'd like to see a proper file management system that allows you to browse and move files easily, combined with a figure loading system that offers to update the figure file if the textures aren't where they're supposed to be.

Thanks for the replies, everyone. As there are multiple texture sets available which people might have, I will remove the texture references. Trying to sort out all the various files installed with Poser and all the files from other merchants and free sources is daunting. I have about given up. I just go through and delete things I don't use, and try to put all my texture MATs under character categories such as V2/Mil Kids, V3, Michael, etc. I think I spend way too much time trying to sort that stuff out. Beth

Also, your texture paths are not likely to be my texture paths. One of those silly Daz installers that I had to use the other day created a subdirectory "texturesDigital Dreams". What's that supposed to mean to me? I'm never going to find things in something obscurely named like that! So I shunted them all into a sensible place like "textureshair" where I will know where to look.

ROFL Beth asked one simple question - with or without texture - and look what you made out of it ;-). I am with Lyrra, load it without texture. I have so many additional textures for Mada's Petals, that I click through the Mats anyway.

I'm with ajax. I used to keep my poses and MATs in good order. Then along came vicki 3 and it all went out the window. I'm a big fan of DAZ, but I violently objected to having my poses folder hijacked by 30-something folders with the '!!!' prefix. That really sucked. Since then, I've pretty much given up. I carted what I needed to the Camera folders and abandoned Poses altogether. Re textures, I prefix all my textures with 'mac', like 'macwood01.jpg', so there won't be any confusion with other people's texs. I bet $50 you've all got a 'wood01.jpg' already. mac PS Sorry to derail your thread, beth.

I've decided. Just needed a push in the right direction. Y'all are welcome to take the thread where you like. :) Beth

I saved my own fully loaded v3 cr2 and punted all those bloody !!! folders to the !!! attic where they belong... grrr I have too many folders in the Pose dir already without DAZ getting triggerhappy.

...I violently objected to having my poses folder hijacked by 30-something folders with the '!!!' prefix. That really sucked... Relocate them. DAZ says 'This will not work with these in any other directory' BS. All you have to do is change where the ReadScript directive is called on. If you want to move them to a JAZ drive on G: you can do it, a long as you tell the PZ2 files where to look by changing the ReadScript directives. I'm not totally sure why they didn't do the thing within the executable installer file to make it so it would look wherever you wanted to install the things and give you an option -- that seems it would have been simple -- but alas, C'Est La Vie. Of course if you have a character you use all the time, you can load all the morphs, export new geometry, remove those morph channels altogether, point at the new geometry, and save a lot of memory.

I think one of the various Vicki 3 Service Releases is supposed to have fixed all those injection poses so that you can now put them wherever you like without any trouble. Haven't tried it yet myself. There were only a few poses you couldn't move. It was because they were calling other poses instead of calling something from outside the libraries directory. Not hard to fix. I was surprised they didn't anticipate that people might want to move the things and set them up to be portable in the first place.

Quote _Dodger: "Relocate them."

Amen.

That is why my favorite Poser utility is the text editor vi ;-)

Ajax is right about V3 InjectionPose folders. All injections call for the !Daz folder under Runtime. I have put all my inj/rem poses into Subfolders and it works fine.

Yeah, the lastest V3 update cures the location problem. No need to bury yourself in an editor to fix anything. I had more of a problem with the !!! in the names. They interfere with PBoost's ##Switchbanks folder. LOL My renamer only does files, not folders, and it took a while to fix them. As for installers and folder names I don't care. I used to try to organize my textures but then realized that I don't HAVE to ever see a texture. If I for some reason need to look at it, I can peek into the MAT file for the location. Now installations are much easier since I only worry about the library folders.

Yeah, I was going to move all the INJ/REM folders at the time, but I lost interest. When I opened vicki at the beginning. I checked the readscripts and realised the folders could be moved. Then came updates, then I just couldn't care. I only bought her to see what readscript did (and because DAZ gave me an additional broker discount... I think I got her for under $40 with all mod cons). Anyway, I've only opened vicki about twice since then, so I'm not that bothered. It's on my 'one of these days' list. mac

'Yeah, the lastest V3 update cures the location problem' Well, unfortunately, the 'location' IS the problem. I've just spent 15 minutes at DAZ and can't find the update. Does anyone have a direct link? It sure would help... mac

Should be on the product page(s) - there were updates for the base and both morph packs.

Attached Link: http://secure.daz3d.com/shop.php?op=itemdetails&item=1098

...I checked the readscripts and realised the folders could be moved. Then came updates, then I just couldn't care... Ahh, if only Windows had symlinks...

Got it. Thanks a lot. mac