ropeypopey: Ah, now that makes a lot of sense [oooo, scary that something like that makes sense - ] So that means that the values you can work with in the joint editor are not actually in the CR2 at all but rather they are calculated by Poser from the sphere mat raw data and the values one might change are then translated back into the raw data.  It's been a while since I've dealt with anything like this - as in back in the days of the XT and the 286 [those where the systems I last did any serious programming on - past that I became a user of programs rather than a writer of them - ]  Guess it's time to brush off the cobwebs and stretch the old math muscles :biggrin:

kuroyume: Thanks, that is definitely helpful.

jevans: So true :biggrin: of course after school I spent a number of years doing simulation programming so I got lots of use out of math that one would have thought had been invented just to torture kids in school :a_grin: mind you, this was the sort of math that I always tried to avoid and a lot of work I did involved table look-ups rather than calculations because all that was needed was close approximations.

nomuse: Two things about undocumented code - first, it makes it hard for anyone else to mess with it, which is the other side of the coin for the big reason why people are taught to document - if you want anyone to be able to pick up your code and understand it, thus making yourself nothing more than an interchangeable cog in the big machine then you need to document well - on the other hand, if you'd rather have the knowledge that nobody can easily replace you, then don't document :m_laugh:

Second thing is that a lot of people who are doing creative work get caught up into it and they don't want to pause to document things so they think to themselves that they'll go back and document later ... well, we all know how often later really comes, and then by the time that they decide they are really going to go back and document stuff, they discover that they haven't got a clue what it was they had been doing and they whole thing is gibberish :m_shocked: :m_letdown:

That becomes even more true as new versions come out and they just patch the old stuff to allow it to do new things.  I suppose one should get a hold of a Poser 1 CR2 file and start by playing with that and examining it and then gradually work your way up and see what changes.  It might actually be a lot easier that way.

I do like the fact that it is plain text, as for it becoming hex, I don't think we need to worry because as I understand it that is in part what the RSR files are - I believe Poser takes the OBJ file [which is also plain text] and the CR2 file and interprets the data in the OBJ by the commands in the CR2 and generate the RSR file which is a hex file that is what Poser actually uses.  If there is no RSR file then Poser generates a new one but if the RSR exists then Poser uses that.  Now some of the data in the CR2 is not included in the RSR - I think that would be the maps such as texture, trans, bump, etc and material info, etc.