Hi. I'm new to Daz Studio and am working on a small animation project. I'm used to using Bryce 5, but sadly it can not do what I need without a ton of work. I am using the fantasy book prop from daz, but I want to use my own textures on the book. I have made my textures but don't know how to get daz studio to display them on the book prop. Could somebody help me with this? Thanks. David

The easiest quick-and-dirty way is to convert the existing .cr2 file for the book into a .pz2 MAT pose file. (Note that there are lots of other ways, don't take this as The One True Way, this is just what I'm happiest with.)

• Make a copy of the .cr2 and open it in a text editor.

• Right at the top is a "version" section, and a single bit of data between a pair of curly brackets. Keep this bit, and mark all the text from there down to...

• Move down to the end of the file, where you'll find a bunch of "material" sections, detailing all the material names in the object. Scroll up, going over all the materials, until you reach a "figure" statement, which actually contains all the materials (if you note carefully how all the curly brackets go). Delete from your mark at the top down to just above the "figure" section.

• The first two lines of the statement are "figure" itself and an opening bracket. Delete from here (usually for a poseable figure, a Name statement and a few addChild and weld statements, among others) down to the first material section.

This should leave your file as a tiny "version" section and a "figure" section consisting only of a bunch of material statements. Change all the existing file paths to your new texture files, and save the file with an appropriate name using a .pz2 extension. One advantage of doing it this way is that you get a MAT pose that you can apply to the figure, and also change the MAT of the book as it appears in existing scenes.

Another quick-and-dirty way would be to use the Surfaces tab in DAZ|Studio and manually change every single file reference to your new files. This is do-able in something simple like that book, but for anything really complex with lots of different materials and a dozen or more textures, bump maps, transmaps etc., it gets depressingly easy to miss one or two and end up with something that looks really weird.

BTW, there is a new version of D|S available at DAZ. Keep your old copy of the v1.0.1.0 installer handy, though, because some people are having problems with v1.2.0.1 and you might not be one of the lucky ones who aren't getting odd crashes...

I'd highly recommend just using the Surfaces tab and changing each material to reference your new files. Once that's done, you can save as a scene (.daz), so you can load the book with the textures already applied.

Or if you have several different texture sets save as a material preset, which you can then apply to the book as needed (like a Poser Mat file, except you can select and retexture multiple instances of your book in one go should you need to). If you get 1.2.0.1 you can save a partial material preset, changing only some settings, which may make for greater flexibility.

Thanks for all the help. I manage to get it the way I wanted it. I'll post a few screen shots when the project is complete. :)