I'm not sure if this has been discussed elsewhere but a Mac customer of mine using Poser 5 contacted me and said that my MAT files (which were created on a PC) referenced PICT files, and all my texture files were TIFF. She had to go in and convert all the TIFF files to PICT in Adobe photoshop for my product to work (AZL Crowd Kit). This is the first time I've ever heard of this. Does anyone know what's going on? Why would the Mac OS change a text file that says "TIF" to "PIC?" How do I prevent this from happening in the future. Thanks in advance. azl

If I understand this correctly, your MAT files on her Mac want to see PICT files for textures, but couldn't find or read your TIFF files, but the files appeared to be PICT files when she inspected them? Mac OSX may interpret TIFF files as PICT so that it can open them in the Preview app that is part of OSX, but the files are not really converted to PICT filesjust labeled as such. It is also possible that her download/decompression software is set to label TIFF files as PICT without actually converting them. IIRC, P5 on the Mac wants to find PICT or JPG files for texture maps. The easiest way to prevent this in the future is to tell Mac users to open the texture files first in Photoshop and save them as PICT. The nicest way would be to do the conversion yourself: just "save as" twice, once as a TIFF file and once as a PICT or JPG.

It sounds weird. Post the line that refers to the texture file so we can see why OS X wants a different file. If you wrote the Mat file in Windows, and PICT is a Mac-only format, it makes even less sense.

I get a lot of "Must convert the PICT file" message when I make bump maps from tiffs but that is the only occurance that I can think of that it reads a TIFF file as a PICT or at least calls it that in the window.

This is a bug already present in PP4 - I have reported this to CL, they never fixed it. In some cases Poser poser loads the tiff and in subsequent loads Poser wants to have it as a pict. Use jpg instead.

Attached Link: http://www.lemkesoft.com/

So using MacConverter will not prevent the problem? I'll suggest GraphicConverter to my customer. Thanks.

The problem does not occur with jpgs - so why not use them ?

TIFF transparencies are sharper than JPGs and less likely to contain artifacts.

Azl, What if you save the jpg without compression?

I never thought of that, actually, because to me the use of JPGs was to save space. If uncompressing them means using up more space than a TIFF, I'd rather go with the clarity of a TIFF. On the other hand, that will eliminate the problems with MAC use. Thanks. I'll definitely consider it.