I've been trying to add textures to one of my M4 characters skins. I notice though that sometimes i am losing morphs after a save.

I tried adding a tattoo to the chest area. To do this, i swapped out the diffuse texture for the Torso texture, added the tattoo, then reapplied the torso texture to the chest material zone. But the thing is, the torso texture includes the chest, head, and other material zones. Do i have to re-apply the new torso texture with the tattoo to ALL zones? Right now i'm just adding the torso texture with the chest tattoo to the chest area only, and leaving the old texture in the other material zones. Could this be what is corrupting my morphs?

nope in all instances. I would elaborate but I've found that elaborating is a distinctly unpleasant experience here at the Poser forum, I'm sure that an expert will be along to help you shortly. Waitaminute , I hear the creaking of crutches... Here comes one now!

I am not aware of ANY way that a texture can ruin a morph. It has to be something else, but without more details I can't even hazard a guess.

Laurie

Texture maps work on material zones. They can not kill morphs.

Saving a lot with pmd files enabled can lead to a corrupt pmd file.
That is a known issue.

Disable extrnal binary morphs in general preferences to disable the use of pmd files.

Generally, changes should be applied to all material zones regardless whether the zone needs to be changed or not.  This is just a matter of consistency throughout all the body zones for appearance sake.  This should not have any bearing on any applied morphs unless, of course, using external binary morphs is somehow getting corrupted in the save as vilters is stating.  However, there is not enough practical information to determine if this is issue. 

• Is the M4 morphed character a saved model in your Library, or
• Is it a base M4 which you are applying morphs, then attempting to change the skin textures.

If it is the latter, attempt to apply the textures to a newly morphed M4 and save.  Bring him back into Poser and note if anything changed.  As another alternative, bring your established character onto the stage, apply the textures, and save back under a different name and Library location.  Reboot Poser, then bring him back into the scene.  Do this under the assumption that the originally save character was not corrupted initially.

And, if you are using External Binary Morphs, turn that off completely and repeat either of the suggestions stated above.

Quote - ...Do i have to re-apply the new torso texture with the tattoo to ALL zones?

No, you do not.

When you apply a texture to a material, that texture gets loaded with the model. So, if you apply a new texture to the Chest material and keep the old texture on the Torso material, BOTH textures will be loaded on the model in the Preview pane and during rendering.

However, it is generally good practice to keep the textures consistent, as they are intended as mapped. The reason for this is memory - If you had separate 4000x4000 texture images for every material, all of those would get loaded at the same time.

High resolution textures can take up a ton of memory when you're loading up several of them. Instead of just one 4000x4000 texture, you could have several or many, all loading up at the same time, reducing your machine to a crawl.. If that's not necessary, limit the amount of memory needed by just doing good "bookwork" and loading up as few textures as necessary. That's why it's common practice to change all the textures across material zones, if they all normally call and share the same texture image file.

Quote - ..Right now i'm just adding the torso texture with the chest tattoo to the chest area only, and leaving the old texture in the other material zones. Could this be what is corrupting my morphs?

Textures won't blow out your morphs, unless you're talking about some displacement or bump map problems.

But, you could end up with a model that is so memory "heavy" that strange things could happen. I find that hard to accept, given that if you can run the software, one model probably wouldn't do it unless the textures were absurdly large.

Another thing - Morphs take up space, too. In many ways, they're just like real geometry and have to be loaded as well. (In Poser.) You don't see them rendered, but the data is there, regardless, and takes up space.

It's "feasible" you could have memory problems that could cause your issue, but it's very, very unlikely they'd be caused by your texture manipulations. (I don't know if it's even possible, since I don't know how the program would deal with that sort of memory problem. Likely, it'd dump the textures first, though.)

Ok, after some testing, i found out it's another very weird problem. I started another thread because it has absolutely nothing to do with textures.