Howdy, I designed a wrestling ring (Pandorian's Wrestling Ring Gen - 2) which has been selling here on R'osity since a few years back which is compatible with Poser 5 and up.  I recently installed it on Poser 2012 and noticed that when I load the wrestling ring figure into the Poser Preview window, it continues to come up with a dialogue box stating the following: "Please locate "NO_MAP"

I simply press the cancel button since I never designed an image map called "NO_MAP" for this ring at which point it proceeds to ask me if I want to continue to look for it and I say no, then everything loads fine afterwards, however the ring itself is pitch-black, until I apply a pre-determined texture to it from the Pose menu.  This only occurs with the 2012 version of Poser (both Mac and Windows versions) but not with any previous versions. 

Any help or suggestions as to what I need to do to address this issue would be greatly appreciated. 

Thanks in advance,

-J. Lebron aka Pandorian

Open the file in a text editor and search for NO_MAP. It should not be enclosed in quotes.

Or create a null file (empty file) called NO_MAP and put it in your runtime:textures folder

This will solve all the instances of NO_MAP failures in CR2s

Attached Link: http://forum.daz3d.com/viewtopic.php?p=2705010#2705010

Okay, this file is a figure so I went to the "Characters" subfolder in the Runtime Libraries folder and checked the CR2 file.  There are no entries of NO_MAP in the CR2 file, there are only "" entries. I'm feeling as though I'm missing a step here or am possibly not following the directions properly. 

If it's not too much trouble, how exactly would I go about creating a null file called NO_MAP?

Go into a text editor and save an empty file

Leave the editor and rename to file to "NO_MAP"  - no quotes, no extensions

Then copy the file to the runtime at location runtime:textures

Where the runtime is depends on how you installed Poser

It is just a trick to fool poser - having it load an empty file instead of skipping the entry as it should have done.

Poser picks up most of these references, but apparently not this one

Okay, I did as you suggested wimvdb, I no longer get that NO_MAP prompt, however a dialogue box pops up stating the following: Texture could not be loaded. Image map file could not be found, or there is not enough memory to load. After I press OK, the ring loads and it is still pitch black. 

The NO_MAP file must be absolutely empty. At least that is how it always worked for me.

But - there is something else going on as well. The no_map indicates for poser: No texture map. So if you press OK and hit cancel or if you load the no_map file, that should not change anything about the textures.

If a texture does not load properly and shows as black in the preview, then there is apparently a real texture wich is not loaded.

Check the materialname in the poser room and then look into the CR2 file if there is something strange going on in that material section. (Missing quote, wrong path reference, spelling mistake or something else). It is always possible that PP2012 parses these filenames differently as in PP2010 because the whole program has been transferred to use unicode (which is a method how text is written internally)

Since I don't have the prop and the textures there is not much I can do to check for these errors.

The wrestling ring is a figure, not a prop.  When I designed it, I initially designed it to load untextured as I included a variety of textures and styles to choose from to apply, including a remove all textures option.  As to why it loads like a black silhouette, (after I tell the dialogue box not to search for NO_MAP) is a bit concerning, it does however become visible "after" I apply a texture to it.  I just found that a bit curious as it didn't do that in earlier versions of Poser (Pre 2012 version).  This entire issue is not so much of a problem as it is an annoyance, and since I am a R'osity vendor, I don't want my customers to have to deal with that annoyance if at all possible. 

I'd like to thank everyone for their assistance with this issue, it is very much appreciated.  I'd also like to give a personal thanks to Wimvdb, who really went out of his way to assist me extensively via email.  :)

A very appreciative and grateful,

• J. Lebron

I experienced this problem as well. PP2012 objected to all my customized figures with the NO_MAP complaint. Now every CR2 has scores of NO_MAP instances, but PP2012 doesn't like the ones with quotes around them or at the end of them. PP2010 had no problem with this.

Before I saw the solutions above, I went through my MAT files with a text editor and changed every instance of NO_MAP with quotes into NO_MAP without quotes. There were a couple variations, with spaces in different places and varying numbers of quote marks. You need to find them and copy/past into your Replace field to make sure you get it exactly right.

Then I used the cleaned-up MAT files to re-apply the MATs to my characters so Poser wouldn't  put up that annoying message every time a figure enters a scene. The solution above about the empty NO_MAP file seems easier.

Better still would be if SM would fix the bug in the service release. I call it a bug because out of the last several Poser versions, I didn't experience it until P9 / 2012. Every figure in my library (except the out-of-the-box default V4) generated the error.

I get this error all the time in Poser 9.  I just tell Poser to skip it and not look for anything else then resave the file.  You would think Poser would be smart enough to realize that NO_MAP is not an image file.  Thanks for the suggestion to create an empty text file.

In this case (Pandorian) the problem was that there were empty image nodes connected to the diffuse channel. Posers HW Shaded Preview mode has a problem with this. If you either remove the empty image nodes (simple deleting them in the material room) and resave cr2 to the library - or - turn Off HW Shaded Preview when you load the CR2, the problem is gone.

This particular instance of the NO_MAP error is a bug/limitation in P9 and PP2012 and probably in P8 and PP2010 as well if you turn On HW Shaded Preview

I am curious is anybody has sent this bug into smith micro?  Perhaps they arent aware of it? If you havent, please do, maybe if many folks send it in they will fix it?

I reported it to Smith Micro - that is the one with the empty image maps and preview

If you have other occurances of this bug you should report it with the circumstances where it occurs