I am working with a beta tester on a character I made. I only have Poser 5 and he has poser 4 Is there a special way to set it up, because he cannot get the textures to work (there is nothing special about the textures) Right now I sent it to him with the morphs in one folder and the textures all in another folder. Nothing was set up as Runtimelibaries...etc. He had no problem with the morphs If you can make heads or tails on what I just said, could you answer me please Thanks

its all about the folders, and where the texture files are located. if the .cr2 is looking for the textures in a specific folder and it can't find that folder, or those textures in that folder, then they won't work. P4 and P5 have the same folder setup, as far as I can remember, so it shouldn't really matter that one is p4 and the other is p5. except that some things are specifically made for p5, and won't work in p4 without some manipulation, if at all. I can't comment much on that though. someone else would have to help there.

The texture maps have absolute pathing by default when added in Poser .
To make it distributable, the paths have to be edited to be relative .
example
textureMap "C:PoserRuntimeTexturestest.jpg"
change to
textureMap ":Runtime:Textures:test.jpg"
or
textureMap ":test.jpg"
Do this for all map references in the cr2 file .

After editing, you can check that all pathing is relative with Laetia's Merchant Utility Tool .
http://www.renderosity.com/freestuff.ez?Form.Contrib=laetia&Topsectionid=0

Message edited on: 09/20/2004 04:08

Also, some (most!) of the features of Poser 5's material room won't translate to Poser 4. They'll just be ignored. I have both versions - let me know if you need some help.

Actually, textures will only have absolute paths if they're loaded from somewhere OUTSIDE the Runtime:textures: folder. If you have a texture residing in your "My Documents" folder, then yes, Poser WILL make that an absolute path. But if you make your character or prop with textures that are allready in the right place, then Poser will use a relative path. But Laetia's tool is indispensable. It checks for so much more than just paths!

Re post #5:

"Actually, textures will only have absolute paths if they're loaded from somewhere OUTSIDE the Runtime:textures: folder."

The above statement is NOT correct (at least not in regard to Poser 4). To prove it I loaded a Poser box prop, then applied a JPEG from the .RuntimeTextures folder, and saved the box back to a pallet. The resulting path statement:

textureMap "C:Poser 4RuntimeTexturesA_NECK02.jpg"

In my experienes the Poser 4 (I suspect this will also apply to P5) will always use an alsolute path, unless the texture that is applied was originally loaded into Poset in another item that did use a relative path.

Well in Poser 5 it works... Haven't used P4 in ages, but I never have to correct my paths when I just make sure the textures are at their right place before I start saving it to the library.

Ernyoka1, you are right, I just checked, P5 does seem to create a relitive path with Runtime as the root.

textureMap ":Runtime:textures:Female Muscle Texture.tif"

Looks like we were both right, and both wrong. These days I guess it's not safe to say anything unless we prefixed it with version number.

:o) I just can't remember P4 NOT doing it. Are you using plain P4 or Pro Pack? Perhaps Pro Pack did it too? It's really such a long time since I used anything but P5, so I can't remember it any more. But I can't recall having to fix a lot of texture references even when I used Pro Pack And you're right :o) Version is important, so people should state their versionwhen they ask a question :o)

Plain old P4. I also notice that P5 uses colons (:) rather than slashes (), which is nice.

Well...Thank you for the info,. but I am still a little confused. When I am working on a texture or morphs etc. I keep everything in a folder out side of the Poser 5 folder. (to keep Poser files from becoming so cluttered) for example a main folder "Working Folder", then inside this folder I Have sever folders, "Textures", Morphs, etc. This main folder "Working Folder" with the folders inside is what I sent to my beta tester (zipped up). Along with a pz3 file. I know (if I move or change a texture) when I open the pz3 file Poser 5 ask me where the original textures are. Does Poser 4 do this? Should I put my files inside poser runtime then remake the pz3 file?

Poser 4 also searches for textures within Runtime - if not found, it will ask you where they are. For distribution, they should be packaged within :Runtime:textures:[subfolder] If you zip them without paths, they'll end up cluttering the Runtime since many people will just unzip to there (and I think that Poser won't see them there). If you zip with paths to your development directory, then the same problem will occur, but with a load of strange directories. Poser users have become used to just unzipping straight to PoserRuntime, so illogical as this behaviour may seem, you ought to allow for it. :)

Thank you for the info I guess I will put everything into the PoserRuntime folder and go from there Thanks again