I am very new to Poser, I got poser 6, And I am completly clueless. I was able to mess around with the bodies, But then i got extras, Like Hair and things. And for the life of me cannot figure out how to or where to unzip the files and get them into Poser program. Can someone please help me figure the program out. Alot of people said it was well worth the buy. I bought it and sit here and just stare at it.. lol If someone could please help me, I would so grealty appreciate it. I have messengers also if that would help also. Thank you Stormy

I would be happy to help you, but rather than take up the bandwidth here in the forum,out can we use something like yahoo messenger? That would let me help you without a lot of back and forth on this site. I am sparky8c@yahoo.com. We can get you started on a very interesting hobby, and yes, you have an excellent starter program. As with everything in this biz, there is always a "better" (read more expensive) program, but you will be able to move on up once you get a handle on Poser. you will find many EXCELLENT tutorials on this site, so look around a bit first. Search for Dr Geep.

Check the zip files that you downloaded. They usually include instructions as a readme file. Here is a brief summary on where the files are supposed to go:
"pz2" files go to poser6/runtime/libraries/pose /
"pp2" files go to poser6/runtime/libraries/props/
"hr2" files go to poser6/runtime/libraries/hair/
"cr2" files go to poser6/runtime/libraries/character/
"Obj." files go to poser6/runtime/geometries/
texures go to runtime/textures
(textures can be jpg. bum. or tif or any image format basically)

So for example: If you have downloaded a hair file, the zip would include something like this " hair.hr2", "hair.png" and "hairtexture.jpg" and finally "hair.obj" in this case you would put "hair.hr2" and "hair.png" into runtime/libraries/hair/folder of your choosing. The jpg. file would go into runtime/textures and finally the obj. file would go into runtime/geometries

If you are using PC you can drop the "runtime" folder from your zip file into poser6 folder. The program will ask you if you would like to overwrite the exsisting files and just klick yes. If you are using Mac tho, then DON'T do it. Hope this helps a little.

Message edited on: 11/20/2005 20:14

Message edited on: 11/20/2005 20:15

I put the files in the folders where they say to put them, When i am in Poser, How do i get them into the program? Like import them or something? I am so confused lol Meaning if i extract a new hair file, How would i get it into poser to use it:)

Message edited on: 11/20/2005 20:19

Well to find your new hair file, first open the libraries tab in poser; then open the hair library and look for your new hair file. If your new hair file was a cr2 file, then look for your new hair file in the figures tab. You don't have to import anything if you have installed things correctly. It's allways good to try and remember the folder names where you installed your new items.

But briefly; Open libraries tab; New figures (cr2 files) are allways in character folder, hair files can be in props (pz2), figure (cr2) or hair (hr2) library and prop (pp2) files are allways in props library.

then just double klick on the icon once you regognice the item that you installed and it should load fine. If it doesn't then you have probably installed something wrong and must help poser locate the files manually.

This sounds confusing but once you get the hang of it, it is quite easy to do. God knows I installed 50% of my stuff in the wrong folders when I first got poser. ;D

Message edited on: 11/20/2005 20:32

Ty so much I will try that.. i think everything i have installed was wrong : lol

No problem. Just allways check the zip files for a readme file. It usually tells you where to locate your new stuff and how to install it as well. English is not my motherstongue so I hope you understood what I wrote. Perhaps someone more qualified could take over from here. I desperately need some sleep. :D P.S. I installed most of my stuff in the wrong folders as well when I started using poser. But hey you learn from mistakes. :D

For you saying your english wasnt your first language, I would of never known, Everything you said I compleltly understood, And figured out how to get the hiar :) tyvm

A picture to show you the file structure of a Poser Runtime can be found here: http://www.daz3d.com/support/faq/index.php?id=94 Basically, what it boils down to in a nutshell: If you are looking for a Character or a piece of clothing/shoes, in Poser you will find them in libraries/character If you are looking for hair, you will find them in either library/character/hair OR library/hair If you are looking for character texture addons, hair textures, clothing textures, you will find them in library/poses. Sometimes on the rare occasion, a merchant will package their textures so that they go into the "Camera" folder (.cm2 files). If that is the case then you can either apply them from there, or do what I do and change the file extension to .pz2 If you are looking for props, they are located in library/props Sometimes you will find clothing and hair or shoes in library/props too, depending on whether the item is actually created and saved as a figure, or it was created and saved as a prop. Figure items are "conformed" or "parented" Props are parented. If you are just starting, it's best to get started on the right foot. DO NOT just install files into the runtime! That will only lead to frustration because you won't be able to find anything, and not all files are packaged equally and land up all over the place. Here is a link to a tutorial on using multiple runtimes. http://forum.daz3d.com/viewtopic.php?t=9060&start=0 This thread talks about multiple runtimes too. I have a post in there about how I organize my folders. Look for "Acadia" if you want to check it out. http://www.renderosity.com/messages.ez?Form.ShowMessage=2303505 When I first started Poser, I installed everything into the main Poser 5 runtime and I couldn't find anything. I was so frustrated and gave up on Poser very other week.. literally. Here are some great newbie tutorials that will get you through the bare basics: http://trekkiegrrrl.dk/tut1.htm http://www.poserguide.nimprodaction.com/issues/issue2/cover.htm http://www.poserguide.nimprodaction.com/issues/issue3/cover.htm http://www.poserguide.nimprodaction.com/ http://www.canary3d.com/tutorial/3d-intro.htm http://www.ebonshire.net/tut-posb/index.php http://www.cooltuna.com/poser/poser-tutorials.html http://www.renderosity.com/tut.ez?Form.ViewPages=155&Form.sess_id=52280005&Form.sess_key=1129030101

One of the problems with Poser 6 is actually that they've completely muddled up what "USED to be the norm" In Poser 6, you have conforming clothes in the Props folder. Conforming hair in the normal Hair folder, together with "regular" hair and dynamic hair. I guess the nice people at CL/E-frontier believed they made it easier.. but it's confusing because a lot of the tutorials about where to place (and find) stuff suddenly doesn't fit anymore. But, as it's said, Poser is a great hobby. Actually it's more than a hobby. Poser is very addictive, and before you know it, you'll be pale as an asparagus for never getting outside anymore. Your family will have a vague memory of you, and you will probably have forgotten all about them... but on the plus side, you're having fun ;o) If you want more help and guidance, you can get hold on me on almost any messaging service out there - messenger@trekkiegrrrl.dk for MSN and I'm TrekkieGrrrl everywhere else (yahoo, AIM, Skype - Ern Yoka on ICQ though... a leftover from old times...)

Hi Stormy! - Step 1: Take a DEEP breath. :-D Poser is easy to learn and use, but it WILL take some time. Patience is a virtue. Before you go off and download lots of add-on stuff, you should probably give yourself some time (a week?) to just play around with what's built in to the program and learn your way around. There are lots of helpful people and tons of helpful information here, but you just CAN'T digest it all at once. It'll take you a while to learn enough of the lingo to even understand what people are telling you! So here are FOUR REALLY BASIC TERMS to get you started. #1 RUNTIME - Inside the folder on your hard drive where the poser program "lives" there is a folder called RUNTIME. And this folder is the skeleton and circulatory system of Poser. All the figures, props, texture, poses, hair, faces, etc. etc. live somewhere in the sub-folders of the RUNTIME folder. You will become VERY intimate with the structure of these sub-folders. Part of the RUNTIME folder is what Poser shows you in the Library on the right side of the window under Figures / Props / Poses, etc. So when you DO install things correctly into the RUNTIME folder, you don't have to import them or anything. They just "show up" somewhere in your Library, and you can go in there and bring them into your scenes. While every RUNTIME becomes unique, some details of the structure are the same for all installations of Poser. That is why many ZIP files you download can just be unzipped into the RUNTIME folder and everything will go where it's supposed to be. If you see a 2nd RUNTIME folder INSIDE your RUNTIME folder, it means you unzipped a file that should have been unzipped one level up, in the program folder. (C:Program FilesPoser 6 or whatever.) #2 GEOMETRY - It is important to realize that, because of the way Poser works, many of the items you use that seem like a single thing are actually stored in multiple pieces. The actual data that makes up a figure's shape (called the "mesh" in some 3-D programs) is called the geometry. It has an .OBJ file extension, and goes into the GEOMETRIES sub-folder of RUNTIME. But the geometry itself is not enough for Poser to use a figure (or prop or hair or...). Poser uses other files that tell it how to work with the geometry, and these are what you see in the Library window as Figures, Props, Hair, etc. As a newbie, this is only important to you for 2 reasons: Reason 1 is that without the geometry a character will not work. Victoria by DAZ is one of the most popular figures for Poser. When you buy or download Victoria, you get both the Victoria geometry file and the Victoria figure files that show up in your Library. (On your disk, these figure or "character" files have a .CR2 extension.) You will see many other "Characters" for Victoria available for download. These are alternative figure files that change the way Victoria looks, but they do this by working with the geometry that came with the base figure. If you don't have the base figure, you don't have the geometry, and none of the characters will work. Some popular base figures are Victoria, Michael, David, Stephanie Petite, Aiko - all from DAZ, and non-DAZ characters Apollo Maximus, Laroo, H.E.R. and MayaDoll. You'll also see references to Posette and Dork - the base figures that came with Poser prior to P6 - and Jessi and James, the new base figures that come with P6. Each of these figures includes a base geometry that dozens or hundreds of other characters (many of them free) will be based on. Reason 2 is that geometries must always go in a specific place in your RUNTIME and that place is determined by the character's creator. The other files can be moved around as you see fit. For example, if your Figures Library has a "SuperCats" folder that was created when you installed a cat figure, and you want to put the cat from that folder in the "Animals" folder for the sake of organization, you can do that. But if the GEOMETRIES folder contains a "SuperCats" folder, you can't delete or rename that folder, or move its contents. If you do, you will break any figures that rely on the meshes inside the folder. #3 CONFORMING & PARENTING - Quick Poser history lesson: In the old days, Poser distinguished between Figures, which had parts that could be posed, and Props, which were just static objects. (On your hard disk, prop files have a .PP2 extension, while figures have .CR2) If you had a Prop that needed to move along with a Poser figure, it could be "parented" to one of the body parts of the figure. So for example a coffee mug could be parented to a hand, so when the hand moved, the mug would move along with it. Or a hat prop might be parented to a figure's head. When clothing was added to Poser, they needed a way to make sure that the clothing moved along with the body that was "wearing" it. So they introduced the idea of "conforming." Conforming is limited to figures (rather than props) since it basically means a figure makes all the same moves that another figure is making. This decision is still with us. It mandated, for example, that all conforming clothing items be treated as "Figures" rather than "Props", which explains why clothing often appears in the Figures library and there is no "Clothing" or "Costumes" library. It also led to a split in the world of hair. Early hairpieces in Poser were simply props that got parented to the head, and they appeared in the Hair library. (These files have an .HR2 extension.) But as more advanced hair pieces with posable parts came along, they were considered Figures, and added to the Figures library (since their files had the .CR2 extension could not live in the "props only" Hair library.) Adding to the confusion (as noted) is that Poser 6 removes some of the arbitrary limits on what kind of thing can go in which Library folder. Maybe this will all be resolved happily in the near future, but I'm not holding my breath. The moral of the story is that if you now find yourself hunting through the Library trying to find things, congratulations! You're already using the program in the same way as some of the most advanced Poser experts! :-) #4 MORPHS - Since there is such a small number of base figures, Poser renders would all look the same if the only way to make images was to pose the base figures. However, you can do more than just pose (bend) the mesh of a Poser figure. You can also distort it. By distorting the mesh of the base figure in creative ways, you can do things like create facial expressions, change face and body features, alter the shape and size of body parts, etc. These distortions of the base figure are called Morphs. Poser figures all come with built-in morphs, and additional morphs can also be purchased and added later. If you put together a bunch of morphs that work together, you can make it available as a Character, and that's how most of the characters you see available for download are created. Morphs are controlled by dials in the Poser interface, just like the bending and twisting of limbs. Some morphs show up automatically, and some have to be added manually. A full discussion of the different types of morphs and how to use them is deeper than I want to go in this posting. Learning all about morphs is one of the longer roads you will travel in your Poser journey. Note that while some characters use unique morphs created by the vendor, some are made by using built-in morphs, or even popular add-on morphs. This means that the character you are downloading is really just a packaged-up bunch of morph dial settings. If such a character is based on add-on morphs, and you don't have those already, the character will not do anything. It essentially tries to set dials that don't exist, because the morphs the dials are attached to have not been added. This is most common with Victoria and other DAZ characters - many of these use the Victoria (Michael, Aiko, etc.) Head & Body morphs, which are an add-on packs available (for $$$) from DAZ. That is why it is important to check what is required when downloading stuff, especially characters. If it just says "Requires Victoria" you can use it with the base figure and don't need anything else. If it says "Requires Victoria and Head & Body Morphs" you will need both the base figure and the add-on morph pack to make use of the character.

Jimdoria, that is about the best, clearest explanation of Poser that I have ever read I have been messing with it for years,but you lay it out beautifully, and I learned a thing or two myself! as the Aussies say "Good on ye".

I agree, this is very well put, jimdoria!

Thanks so much to all that replied to my help post. I got alot of ideas on how to get started. I got some help and i can put hair on a Model, Well put it on semi lol But its a start. Thanks all. Any help is greatly appreciated. Thanks again all, you guys are great.