Ok, I finally got Madison's dress to fit nicely dynamically; however, every time I apply a texture(see attached picture), Poser displays a white dress with no texture. I changed the lighting to solid white lights, as Poser's default lighting caused terrible shadowing, and the dress looked like vomit camoflague. This is driving me nuts all afternoon. It is like Poser has Alzheimers, in that it forgets how to do something; then it takes 1 hour to drape this simple dress of less than 2500 polys, and 1/2 hour to render using OEM Poser lighting. Please help as I am getting PO'd bigtime. -The Starkdog

BTW, the dress renders just as shown, -white, no textures. Anyways, I'll try to make a new UVmap. Surprisingly, I could not render the dress with the texture map in Shade7.2 either. Maybe my machine is crappy. I don't know? -The Starkdog

I wouldn`t attach the map to the ambient colour, that should make the dress too bright.

Over my head but you can put it in full preview for the poseroom but it will show the default texture size 1x1. You can scale that texture down some(.5x.5) and drag a wire down to bump (o.100 or so). This will give it some life to get you going.

Xantor's right. Ambient color is the wrong place for that texture. As a general rule of thumb, I find it's best to not use ambient lighting features at all in any render engine.

That's a rather silly thing to say :) Ambient light has many uses, IE any time you need something to be self lit, Like a lamp or a TV screen. But yeah Ya don't want to attach that texture there, though since it's set to zero I don't think it's actually doing anything here.

There are other renderers which have seperate self-illumination or iridescent settings apart from ambient light.

It is an interesting question though, why is their a node from ambient color attached to the texture map? Did you do this Starkdog, or did it come that way? If you did it, why did you do it?

Starkdog; Take a good look at the top of the material field. You have the texture set to load into the =preview= channel. That will display exactly what you have, because you are trying to load the texture into a field that does not actively display except in the library tabs. There should be at least one entry beneath preview, and that will be the actual dress. Just hold ctrl, click to highlight both poser surface and image map, go to the right pointing arrow in at the top of the material window, click to open, and choose copy. Then click on the Material downpointing arrow, and switch to whatever exists below the preview entry, which should bring up a Poser Surface panel with no shader plugged into it. Go back to the right arrow, click, and select paste. That should load the image map and all the connections and settings onto the Poser Surface interface.

Are you using the proper material group for that clothing item? I see that you have this set up for the Preview material ....

Hi Dog I've had that problem once or twice myself. I change the material completely to a more neutral setting (maybe one of the p5 people textures in imagemap), then re apply your own image map. John

The use of the "Preview" material looks to be the problem. While it doesn't affect the renders, the Document Display Mode you've chosen doesn't show the texture. For something this simple, click on the rightmost of those buttons and you should see a texture. More complicated shader trees still need to do a render, and you won't see the effects of adjusting scaling and such. Poser 5 can still have problems (some sort of caching?) with showing Material changes. Switching to another material and back will sort that, or doing a render. It can be useful just having a primitive Prop visible as a switching target. Maybe the sphere, it can help set up lights too.

Wow! Thanks for the feedback. Here is what's happening. I created the dress in Shade. While I was making the dress, I changed the color of the dress, as a contrast against Madison, to check for breaks. When I exported the obj, Shade can also save mtl's, which I did. I then brought the dress into Poser to align and fit a smidge larger, since it will be dynamic. I then exported the obj back out, and re-imported it back again. I then took the dress into UVMapper, and made a template. Next, I went into PSP, and used the template to make a texture. I then attached the texture to MTL001 in the cloth room(the dress). I then rendered and rendered, and still no texture. Just out of curiousity, I tried applying the texture in the preview screen to see what would happen, -nothing! Anyways, I tried a different obj, and I was able to toggle between textures, and just plain colors from the color selector thingee. It really makes me mad, because I am so close to getting my first pack together to sell, and I keep getting these little hangups that derail whatever progress I've made. I sure hope that Poser6 is user friendly. Unfortunately, there is a lack of feedback mechanisms in Poser5, other than your clothing simulator runs past 4000 frames. -The Starkdog

Slightly OT, but if you're hoping to sell stuff, I wouldn't use the material name 'MTL001'. This may be a temporary name, but you'd be better to change it to something meaningful, like 'dress' or whatever. To the user, 'MTL001' means nothing. mac

Don`t add the texture to the preview material.

Duh. xantor, missed that Sd, scroll down from Material.Preview>V. That's where the textures should be attached. Never to preview. Off for new glasses

It would really be better for poser 6 (or 7) to not have preview come up as one of the materials, it is easy to apply the material to it.

Either that, or have Preview do something. It could be useful to have an approximate colour for the preview instead of the plain white which underlies some shader trees. Might let you spot a pokethrough more easily while posing. But if you look, I think it's the first Material in the file, .cr2 or whatever, which is the default. SkinTorso on Vicky, for instance. So it's not a problem that needs new program code to fix.

'But if you look, I think it's the first Material in the file, .cr2 or whatever, which is the default' Yep. The material order in the poser model is defined by the order which the materials appear in the obj file. Nothing you do in poser can change that order (short of inserting a dummy part in the obj with all the materials listed in the order you want). The only real reason for having a Preview material is for an obj with no materials assigned to it. In that case, everything gets lumped under Preview. But if CL could be bothered, I'm sure they could figure out a way to have it NOT display when other materials are present. It's the old story. Minor irritation. Not important enough to fix. And so these things accumulate from one version to the next. mac

It doesn't matter the the texturemap is plugged into the ambient. Ambient_Value is set to 0 so it isn't doing anything. Could it do that your dress uv's are all 0? That would explain the texture not rendering. How does the dress look in uv mapper? Also, maybe the normals are pointing inwards, so the texturemap is on the inside.

would also help if the document display mode was set to display textures (last ball)

Either that, or have Preview do something. It does do something. It's the material used by box-tracking.

Ok, I'm all confused now. Let's say that I import the dress as an obj. I go to the material room, and the only option is preview. What do I do next? Do I use the grouping tool to make a group called dress? Do I add a material named dress? I have already UVmapped the dress as shown. I have no problem making textures. One strange thing Poser does, is that it does not display the complete model, but it shows complete when rendered.

Here is the material room screen. Now that preview is my only choice, what do I do now to add an appropriate material, add a group, or just create a material? This is where I get really confused.- The Starkdog

.... it does not display the complete model, but it shows complete when rendered. Many of Poser's display modes won't show the backfaces of a mesh.

What you do is make the material in the Pose room, using the grouping tool. Create a new group. The name doesn't matter, I just use the default name. Use the Add All button. You now have a group comprising the whole object. Make a material (and the name does matter for this), and then delete the group. If you want to make an item with several materials, you need to keep the temporary groups. If you wanted to have some buttons, for instance, assign the burrons to a group. Then make a new group, Add All, and remove the button group. Each group can now be made into a different material. It can be useful to make material groups which match the seams of clothing. Think of some sports shirts where the sleeves might be a different colour of fabric. Or the material could be set transparent.