Often I  fail to apply textures to props and clothes. 

I've just made a Celtic sword, it shows up nicely in (P7). I close down, open the .obj in UVMapper, map it planar and resave, save the texture map as .bmp. Change it to .jpeg, and go back into Poser and reload. In Material, make a new node, 2D texture, image map. I select the texture bitmap, it shows in the Material windows, but nothing on the sword in preview or render.

I did this with a pair of athletic shorts I modifed, and after 4 or 5 failures it suddenly applied the texture.

What am I doing wrong?

Colin_S

The first thing I'd try is the menu choice Render:Reload Textures.  This
forces Poser to pick up the latest version of the textures from disk,
rather than using cached versions.  (P7 has a separate Texture Cache
folder which can hold tex's between sessions.)

Then insure that your remapped OBJ is the only OBJ with that name
that Poser can see.  If you've left earlier versions of the OBJ anywhere
in Poser's runtimes, delete them or rename them,  or move to a folder that is 
totally outside of Poser's world.   When several OBJ's of the same
name are within Poser's reach, it doesn't necessarily pick the latest
or "nearest" one.

Neither of those ideas work, though your point about several .obj files was valid. 

It led me to clear out and start again and I found that it is a UVMapper failure - going through the process, Poser will accept the texture map produced as .bmp (or .jpeg) and happily apply it to any other prop or figure in the runtime. But any texture you pick fails to apply to the sword.

The logical conclusion is that UVMapper is not mapping and/or saving anything to the .obj, even though it implies it is - no error message,freeze or anything.

I will go to that part of the forum and see if anyone there can find my mistake

That's interesting!  I've never had UVmapper fail ... sometimes it gives
weird-looking maps, but never misses entirely. 

Does the OBJ file seem to contain tex info?  Does it have a series
of "vt" lines after the "v" lines?

Not to imply anything, but what you describe is exactly what would happen if you made the node but forgot to plug it into the diffuse.  I've done dummer things, but the memories have been sucessfully suppressed ;)

Sorry, feeling around in the dark.  I think UVM is the least likely culprit, though.

John

When you mentioned other versionsof the sword .obj, I looked back at the versions of the shorts as well, and realised the one which textured properly was a one-piece object and the failures were 2-piece - sure enough the sword has 3 parts,each named. 

Poser imports all bits of the sword as one thing ; UVMapper won't map and save the 3 parts as one thing, but it will do so for each individual part if they are seperated, selected and assigned. It hadn't actually failed, there was nothing it recognised so it saved "nothing" to the .obj.
It looks as if its ok now (with a tweak or 2)

Thanks ockham, it's dead useful to talk on the forum. So often it nudges your thoughts in the right direction.

Yes indeed.  Very often I get the right answer by posting on the
forum, even if nobody replies!

You should be able to assign materials to the three parts
in Poser and then re-export the sword as one OBJ.
Then UVM will handle it nicely.