Can someone point me to where I can find info on the poser file internal structures? I have some pz3 files using imported props & clothes that I want to export as obj files to use in Bryce. I have found the "grouper" utility helps a great deal in reapplying textures for Bryce, but if I have several props in a pz3 that have different textures, but on each prop the texture is only referred to as "Preview" they all get lumped together as a single object by grouper and I can't separate them. I'd like to find a way to learn more about the internal workings of cr2, pp2, etc. files so I can customize them to work better with each other, and because I want to start making some props etc. from scratch to post as free items. Any hints as to where I can find references to this type of info will be much appreciated.

Anthony Hernandez (did I spell it right?), a.k.a. Nosfiratu, CL's Tech Writer is working on documentation for this. I think he has a rough draft of the document that is available if you e-mail him. Kevin Rose used to have great website that described the cr2 format, but currently is between websites as I understand it. Compose, a java-based utility available in Free Stuff here, can extract geometry from cr2's (and pz3's as well I beleive) and give you some options for materials (you can rename materials or split groups by material, etc). You can also use UV Mapper to select certain areas of your mesh and assigne them to groups or materials. Hope this helps.

JK - Yes, thanks. I've been in touch with Anthony recently because my copy of Poser won't open the browse dialog if it can't find a material in a cr2 or other file, it just crashes - everything freezes and the Task Manager shows Poser as "not responding". So far, after several weeks of effort, CL has been totally unable to figure out why this is happening. I've had to go thru all the 100's of items I've downloaded and manually edit all the cr2's, pp2's, etc. to show the exact location of all materials in order for Poser to work on my machine. (What a paininnabutt!) I'll get in touch with him about his document. I have Compose and UVmapper - have only used Compose once to extract an extra pair of arms for a picture I did of an Indian Goddess, will have to look into the material renaming side of it - wasn't aware of that. Thanks for the suggestions.

Arcana has an excellent description of Poser files: http://www.awakemm.com/poserarcana/index.asp CR2Edit has had a map/obj repointer for three years; since version 1.0. Close-to-release ver5 has a tool to extract obj files from CR2,PZ3,HR2,PP2 files and then create a new CR2/HR2/PP2 with the obj as an external reference, as well. It will also extract from obj files groups and materials, as well as deleting and renaming them. Dan http://www.neca.com/~dwilmes/cr2edit.html Sorry Win only for software http://www.zenwareonline.com for ZenPaint, ZenTile, ZenGrid and VueMaster