I mad a new model last night, by the .PHI file method. One of its parts / groups was named inner_wheel_handle, 18 characters. My Poser 4.0.3 kept on saying that it couldn't find any geometry for this or that of its parts. Finally I used my RSR2OBJ to translate its mesh .RSR file back into .OBJ mod , and I found that in the result the name inner_wheel_handle was truncated to inner_wheel_hand . When I shortened this name to less than 16 characters in my .PHI and .OBJ files, my Poser behaved correctly when working from that .PHI file.

Hi That is interesting. I was about to post a similar type of error... I created a very simple 3 grouped chain and called the middle group body. Did it via the .PHI file method, which placed a cr2 in the library ok. However, Poser 4.0.3 would always crash the Mac when I tried to load it. It appears Poser 4.0.3 was confusing the BODY with my Body group in the cr2 file, when trying to load it. Spent ages trying to suss out the problem. Why as it seems such an obvious clanger on my part, well Poser 3.0.1 worked ok with this. I also get: Cannot find the g type errors in Poser 4.0.3 when using the .PHI method where the files are named correctly and Poser 3.0.1 will load them no problem. Suggests there maybe a Poser 4.0.3 bug hidden in there somewhere. Perhaps should do a dos and donts on the PHI way... Take care

phi files don't work in Mac OS Poser 4 there's something wrong with the code in the phi subroutine in the Mac version, which looks for some type of code that is never present in valid obj files. so no valid phi file is going to work AFAIK, no matter what one does to edit an obj file. as an aside, I've found that Poser will duplicate groups or materials of imorted objects that have spaces in their names, by splitting the name at the space. I didn't know about the 16-character limit, although it sounds like something we could expect to happen.

In some specifications of the .OBJ file firmat, a space in a group name means that e,g, g wheel axle with a space in the name, means that the faces from then until frurher notice are in part wheel and also in part axle In file names and group names and material names etc, avoid spaces like the plague. Use the _ (underline) instead, e.g. g wheel_axle .

Attached Link: http://www.renderosity.com/messages.ez?ForumID=12356&Form.ShowMessage=386104&Reply=386394#9

see attached link referring to Thorne's method of using phi files in Mac OS it turns out phi files will work on Mac poser 4.03, provided one imports the grouped object (with proper group names already assigned) into poser, then exports the phi reference geometry object with all boxes checked excepting the last two (Weld body part seams, As Morph Target). The reason they never worked for me is that I omitted that step, which apparently causes some of the co-ordinates to be mislabelled. The omission can also allow internal group names to differ from external names, but editing the internal names to agree with the external names was not sufficient to get phi files to work.