Has anyone encountered this?

I have a mat file using texture files (jpgs) and a skin shader (for the face, some 65 nodes, less for the rest of the body) ... the jpg textures do not display in the preview of the Pose Room. However, they do display in the preview pane of the PoserSurface node in the material room, advanced tab, and the character renders correctly, as in, all jpgs render as expected. The OpenGL driver is the most recent one, there is 4 gig of RAM on the machine, and no other software is running at the time.
Other mat files (from other vendors) load and display correctly.

Anyone have any ideas what might be causing this?

(hope I've given enough information :biggrin:)

RobynsVeil:

Do you have anything plugged into the Diffuse_Color channel on the Poser Surface Node? If you are not using that channel for your node set-up, you can set the value to 0.0 and plug the JPG into it. It will show up on your preview as normal, but not mess up your render. Credit this information to BB, who uses this technique in VSS.

LMK

I would go with lkendall on that.  If it isn't plugged into the Diffuse_Color and it's value set to zero, you will not see it in preview.

That is actually been done that way (plugged into the Diffuse_Color channel and its value set to zero) - it's only happening to one person... the rest of the people using this mat filedon't appear to be having any trouble seeing the texture in preview.

What I might try is do the Add node trick BB showed me some time ago: instead of setting Diffuse_Value to zero, set it to 1 and plug an Add node - with Value_1 and Value_2 both set to zero - into that channel.

Thanks for your replies, guys...

Okay, a further update. First, I should let you know that this is a product that works (displays correctly in the Preview mode of the Pose Room) on my computer, but has exhibited this bizarre behaviour on a reasonably fast system that has 4 gig of RAM, updated OpenGL drivers, the latest SP for Poser 7 installed, and a savvy Poser and OS user sitting at the keyboard.

What is puzzling is this: the textures appear on the preview pane of PoserSurface! The textureMap of the main colour jpg is attached to the Diffuse_Color channel (that was connected all along), with Diffuse_Value set to 0.
Adding an Add(0,0) node and attaching it to Diffuse_Value (set to 1) does not change the preview in the Pose Room in the slightest: it stays white.

Textures from other developers with less "elaborate" shaders load and display on the figure correctly.

And how does it look when he's not using Open GL as display mode?

Good point - she didn't say. Perhaps I should ask her.

Would shaders cause this sort of hiccup in Preview? She has plenty of resources - heaps more than me... so it can't be that. So it might still be her OpenGL thingie which is spitting the dummy?

Check the display engine settings in the render preview tab?

This is, what the Poser Pro 2010 readme says. It probably applies to all versions of Poser with OpenGL:

Poser Pro 2010 offers OpenGL hardware accelerated rendering as well as SreeD software rendering options for the scene preview display.

In most cases, hardware rendered previews will be faster than software rendered previews. Additionally, hardware accelerated performance is independent of the preview window size, whereas software rendering will yield a lower frame rate with larger preview window sizes.

Unfortunately, due to the vast variety of graphics hardware available, hardware acceleration may not be supported on every system. In that case please use the SreeD software rendering option. Poser should automatically detect whether or not OpenGL hardware rendering is supported for your system, and if not, should default to SreeD software rendering.

Poser Pro 2010 supports Hardware shading, allowing you to preview procedural shaders created in the Material room on high performance graphics hardware without performing a final render. This is an extremely demanding task for your graphics hardware. If your graphics board does not offer at least 256 ALU instructions for shaders Poser's hardware check will determine that it is not supported. Some shader effects are not supported in preview at this point. This includes raytraced effects such as Ambient Occlusion, Reflection and Refraction as well as Bump and Displacement Maps. In case a shader contains unsupported nodes or is too complex for your graphics hardware the resulting preview might be all white.

Poser Pro 2010 allows you to configure preview texture size. The maximum size depends on your graphics hardware. Please understand that if your scene contains numerous high resolution textures you might reach the limits of available memory. If you experience failure to load textures please consider reducing preview texture size.

Please note:

• If transparent objects are not displayed correctly or appear inverted, please enable ‘Enhance multi-layer transparency’ in rendering preview settings. This might adversely affect preview frame rate.

• It is strongly recommended that users visit the website of their graphics accelerator vendor and update to the latest driver version.

• 'Optimize simple materials' is active by default and recommended to ease the impact of Hardware shading on your graphics hardware. If you encounter OpenGL preview problems with Hardware Shading enabled and 'Optimize simple materials' disabled, please activate this option.

• ATI FireGL users should select the "Poser" profile for optimal performance.

• If your graphics hardware does not support the creation of a pbuffer for offscreen drawing properly, you might encounter artifacts when rendering preview movies with OpenGL. If this is the case, please do not cover the document window in Poser while exporting a movie.

• Enabling triple buffering or threaded optimization might result in redraw issues.

Good post Dizzi.
I'd say that Poser users are unique in that 99% of them are using "Game cards" in their hardware, never set up correctly, and will always have these "odd" things occuring ion previews.
Poser is really just a play thing for most. It can be much more but it can also demand some better opengl hardware for proper and smooth results.