I gave it a try.

I noticed - all my primitives got combined together as one object... and my textures and colors went away.

Why do people do this?

You people are GREAT for quick answers!

Bill

The only reason I might di that is to UV-map the object so it can take custom textures.

There are lots of reasons someone might want to import or export Wavefront OBJ files. You hit upon one, to consolidate a number of seperate items into one obj file. Saving a morph in obj format is another. You might want a head with eyes, but not all the other body parts, in that case you could export the head and each eye as seperate objects, then import them parent the eyes to the head, and save the whole thing to a props pallet. Some props are distributed as as obj or 3DS or other formats, the only way to get them into poser is to import them. You might want to export a prop to reset its default location. These are just a few of the reasons you might to use import and export, there are others.

That's right, lesbentley... that's how I made my severed head prop..well with lots of help from my renderosity forum friends.. :0) obj also seems the best fromat for exporting stuff out, and then importing back into Poser again

"... and my textures and colors went away" Odd, I've never seen that happen - I often export textured assemblages and re-import to eliminate accidental click-misalignments when assembling complex scenes, and done the same with textured groupings of clothed characters, exporting and then re-imported them to cut down on use of system resources. One pic I did needed 7 clothed figures, and 3 MilDragons ( the "Child is born" pic in my gallery ), and I found that converting two of the dragons into posed props, and converting the posed mother and children grouping into one prop made framing and assembling the final picture much simpler and less demanding on system resources. That was in P4, and never lost a single texture on re-importing, or even on re-loading as props in later sessions. I find OBJ the best format, too, btw.

I think the problem happens when you make a scene out of Poser's own Primitives. When you export a combination of those Boxes, Cylinders, etc, then reimport, the materials are lost. When the props contain custom geometry, or use 'non-owned' OBJ files, the export works right. I think this may be a new P6 'feature', but could be wrong about that.

PS: No, it's not new. Same problem in P4.

Wouldn't it be better saving it as a PZ file..then bringing it back in? that way textures, etc would not be lost I would think..sorry not an expert..just my 2 cents :0)

Yeah, that always happens with exported Poser primitives, but anything else exported as obj's always keep their textures and material settings. (but if they're exported as 3ds sometimes the textures get messed up a little).

the problem with thte primitives is that all of the material zones are named the same thing, "preview." If you take the group editor and give them all one new material and make the name unique to each, then you can avoid this problem. Another great reason for converting things to obj format is for the cloth room. To my knowlege, it's very difficult if not impossible to clothify a conforming figure as is. If you export it as an obj first, however, it's super simple!

Then HOW does one re-name the material???

Another reason - if you have a complex scene that won't render, you can save a lot of memory by exporting and importing. It loses all the morph and joint information, basically "freezing" your scene in its current state.

bookmark

I think the problem with the Poser primitives is that they have no material defined in the obj (usemtl). When no materials are defined for the individual groups, then everything uses "Preview". Same thing will happen if two or more meshes use "metal" as the material, when you reimport them as one obj, they will use the same texture and colour etc, even if diffrent textures and colours were applied before you saved them. In other words each group in what you are saving needs a diffrent material assigned to it, if it is to use a diffrent material when reloaded. The "group" names don't matter, you can have as many groupes as you like using the same name as long as each uses a diffrent "usemtl" name. But if you are loading the meshes from the Poser library pallet, you don't get the option to assign a material unless you first create a new group. If you import the mesh you can assign new materials to existing groupes.

One use that hasn't been mentioned is saving on system resources. Say you're rendering a scene with 20 vickis and 20 mikes. Poser's going to get bogged down pretty quickly. Assuming you have all the figures correctly posed, you can export them all as one obj, then re-import it and render your scene with a lot less memory. mac

OK... I'll give it at try. Thanks all!