You're allowed to answer if people ask you questions about your product here. But feel free to IM me if you prefer.

One tragic aspect of Poser is the fact that Customer Service has been lost in the name of Power. The artists and merchants have so much power, and will not hesitate to use it against anyone who complains enough to irritate someone. Yes, then you have the persistent lack of knowledge attributed to far too many artists or providers of content. The best way to cope with problems is to either create content yourself, or spend much of your valuable free time fixing things. Oh, and be sure to backup your work frequently. Or you'll have a hard drive crash like I did, and lose all your Poser installations and projects. Humbug.

Even putting :Runtime:Textures: in front of the pathname will not ensure that the correct texture is loaded. Poser will load the first texture it finds with that name no matter what pathname is in front of it. That's why anyone who makes stuff for Poser should give the textures unique names. That way, Poser will always load the correct texture since it will not find another texture with the same name.

I don't think that's true. See post #17 above, by Looniper. There's good reason to give textures unique names, and there's also good reason to start texture references with "runtime," even if your texture names are unique.

I was on the store staff at 3DC for a couple of years and a store tester and we came up against this all the time. Full pathnames are a requirement for Poser products there and it never made a difference if the texture was named the same as another texture that the tester or customer had installed in another folder that came before the folder for the product we were testing. I've also come across this same thing several times over almost four years of reviewing Poser products at In Depth Arts.

Message edited on: 12/16/2004 23:12

I'm not saying that :Runtime:Textures: shouldn't be in front of the pathname, it should, but it's more important that names be unique.

I personally like to see atleast artist initials or something at the start of the texture names this helps identify what folder I should look in first , that helps me find them lots faster when I am importing meshes into other software to render, so the unique names is always a big plus for me.

I can't accept all these folders with the artist's names. You could literally have 100+ or more folders in which to search for a missing texture or broken reference. I routinely rename and move everthing to an order that allows me to easily find stuff.

I too spend longer removing artist names and exclamation marks from character/MAT pose folders etc than fixing poor texture file references. Although I do leave the texture folders as they are or otherwise I would waste more time changing the CR2's etc that reference these folders.

The thing that set me off was when I loaded an item in Poser 4 and it needed the bump map converted. Hell, I couldn't find that damned file. Then another time, something was apparently missing, or named incorrectly. Talk about looking for a needle in a haystack. Sometimes I say "to heck with it, I just want to make pictures." So I install things the way they came. Then, BAM, I go to load something, and Poser can't find a file. Then it's back to fixing things before I use them. This is not rocket science folks. If you're talented enough to create something for sale, you should take then time and energy to get it right from the start.