I haven't read the tutorial you refer to, but perhaps a fresh perspective on MAT pose files will help.

A 'cr2' (character) file has a section near its end that lists all the materials it uses, these will be things like:

     material skin<br></br>       material nipple<br></br>     material lips<br></br>       material eyeBrow<br></br>    etc etc

Under each material name will be paramiters that set things like the Object Color, Reflective Color, Ambient Color, etc, and also what maps, texture, bump, transparency, the material uses.

A MAT pose file is this materials section (or part of it) copied out of the cr2 and pasted into a template file. The template is quite simple, it is like this:

{<br></br><br></br>version<br></br> {<br></br>   number <br></br>     }<br></br>figure <br></br>        {<br></br>#---MAT section goes here---<br></br>   }<br></br>}

Here is an example of a partial MAT pose, it sets the Object Color for the skin material and loads a texture map for the skin material:

{<br></br><br></br>version<br></br>    {<br></br>   number <br></br>     }<br></br>figure <br></br>        {<br></br>   material skin<br></br>               {<br></br>           KdColor 0.956863 0.823529 0.815686 1 <br></br>               textureMap ":Ground Default Texture.tif"<br></br>            }<br></br>   }<br></br>}

This Mat file sets the colour of the skin and loads a texture map, in this example only the name of the texture map is included. If only the file name is given Poser will by default search the 'Textures' folder and all of its sub-folders untill it findes the texture map. You can also specify the location of the texture map relitive to the 'Runtime' folder. In this case Poser will not need to do so much searching to find the map and it should load slightly faster, here is an example:

{<br></br><br></br>version<br></br>    {<br></br>   number <br></br>     }<br></br>figure <br></br>        {<br></br>   material skin<br></br>               {<br></br>           textureMap ":Runtime:textures:Poser 4 Textures:P4 woman texture2.tif"<br></br>               }<br></br>   }<br></br>}

You will note that in the above example path to the texture map is seperated by colons ":" instead of slashes "", and starts from 'Runtime' not 'C:Program Files'. Poser will acept a path in the format:

C:Program FilesMetaCreationsPoser 4RuntimeTexturesSomeTexture.jpg

But this is VERY BAD praxis, for a number of reasions I don't have time to explain right now, except to say this could never be used for distribution.

Its a great idea to make MAT pose files using a text editor, it helps you learn how Poser files work, you will probably need somthing better than NotePad (I use the free EditPad Lite). Having said that, the easiest way to make MAT pose files is to use the free utility Mat Pose Edit (MPE).

http://koti.mbnet.fi/~ilaripih/MPEHome/ Message edited on: 06/11/2005 15:33