Hi all,

I keep all of my characters in their own runtimes. I keep their textures and geometries in the main Runtime. This has been a satisfactory arrangement for me for months.

All of a sudden, P7 has decided that it can no longer find any textures. Firstly, when I apply a mat pose or a material to any of my characters, the character turns white in the preview window. Then, when I either render or spot render, the "please locate...texture" dialog pops up, followed by the message "the file was not found. Do you want to keep looking for missing files".

As I said, up until now my setup has been working perfectly for me for a long time, so I don't know whether I might have inadvertently switched a setting or something, I have no idea on this.....

Any help appreciated.

Thanks and regards,
Andrew

You can set prefs once you let P7 scan through all your Runtimes. Then even set to "shallow" search so you are not waiting for the error message all day. Reboot after to take effect.

Probly not the solution but helps

Thanks richardson, but I don't think that P7 is scanning thru' all of the runtimes, as the "please locate" messages come up almost straight away.

Try removing or renaming the libraryPrefs.xml file.  This is Poser's database
for runtimes.  If it's corrupt, Poser won't know where to look. 

Usually this file will be in Documents and Settings .....  Application Data, but it may be
elsewhere in Vista.

Restart Poser and it will create a default Prefs file.  You can then add your
runtimes in the order you want them, starting with the most commonly used.

I meant you get it ti scan by double clicking on your runtimes and letting P7 scan them. Mine takes about 5 minutes to switch between each one. .. Then,, set prefs.  Then,, hopefully it can find its own elbow on the next reboot...

P7 has given me the most trouble in library searches..

I found I needed the default to be DEEP search or it seemed Poser only looks in the current runtime.  The libraryprefs seems likely.

The following will show what poser has as the runtimes

import os , string
import poser

get runtimes

runts = poser.Libraries()
for runt in runts:
    runt = runt.replace("","/")
    print runt

that lists all the runtimes copy and paste to a text file using wordpad and change to a .py extension.

ockham - i deleted libraryprefs.xml and auto-regenerated it but that didn't solve the problem.
richardson - what do you mean "double-clicking on your runtime" ... do you mean in the library palette ? 
markschum - i already have deep search set in the preferences.

richardson - what do you mean "double-clicking on your runtime" ... do you mean in the library palette ?

Yes. Double click all your runtimes  and then open and highltght the one you want Poser to open to.  (Set your rendersettings, scripts, binary morph, Natroom,animation settings,,, all of it..) Then set prefs.  I'm sure you know this. This may not help but "shallow" search may save your sanity..

Some people have zero problems with P7....  Mine is just bearable.

Poser 7 has become very critical on path names for textures since SR3 came out. See if you made an alias for your main runtime by accident or created another directory with the same name. That will get the search monumentally confused. If the search happens to hit a folder name that matches and there is nothing that looks like a runtime inside it, I believe it will instantly tell you the texture can't be found. And don't ever create a folder anywhere named 'Poser 7' or any of the names you use for your stand alone runtime locations. 

mazzam - how would i know if i made an alias for my main runtime ? 
richardson - i still don't know what you mean by "double-clicking on your runtimes" ? .... double-click where ?

All.

Thanks for your help. I have solved the mystery.

The solution to the mystery is that the textures are actually NOT THERE (we were all looking past the obvious). Here is the reason why. I recently re-formatted my computer, and - very stupidly - didn't firstly back up the textures folder.I backed up everything else, i.e. the Geometries, Heads and Libraries folders particularly.

Lucky that I also backed up all my installation zips and exes...I'll have to re-create the textures from those.

*** SIGH ***

regards,
Andrew