Is it possible in one of the recent versions of Poser to save a prop without embedding the OBJ data? I know there are utilities to extract the OBJ (I have one) and it's possible to do it with a text editor (I've done that more times than I can count), but I'd like to be able to save a prop and still reference the external OBJ that I imported to create it in the first place. To me, it would make sense for this to be the default if you save the OBJ in a Poser Runtime under RuntimeGeometries[your file path] and import it from there. If not, this sounds like a great thing to request in the next version.

This weekend, I tried manually extracting the geometries from a complex prop - 1 parent with about 8 child props - and the results were not ... pretty. Specifically, it somehow screwed up all the UV mapping, even though the individual OBJs are still properly mapped - they just don't load the maps correctly in Poser. It also lost the family hierarchy - all the parented props were loose when the PP2 loaded. That latter may have been me missing something or accidentally deleting something - the items were huge, with more than a million lines in the PP2 file before removing the geometry, and it's possible I selected lines that I shouldn't have. But the UV mismapping is puzzling.

Not sure. I've always done it via editing the .pp2... I use one of Netherwork's scripts for that now. I do know that Poser's latest update adds the functionality of Cr2s created with Poser having the option to reference an original obj file rather than one which is saved out from poser to the library... so perhaps something similar will be coming to Poser for an option to reference external .obj for props when saving. It would seem very obvious that a choice for such would be long overdue, or a least a built in utility python script.

On that note... you might want to take a look at this.

https://www.renderosity.com/mod/bcs/creators-toybox/116432

While it's a mildly expensive script utility it does so many things so well that it's easily worth the cost. It does exactly what you're looking for, here's the relevant text from the user guide for the product

Outstanding! Thanks for the tip!

In the meantime, I think this is something that warrants going in the wishlist forum for the next version, too ;)

You can manually hack a .pp2 file. Save the imported obj as a prop, then open that .pp2 file with wordpad or some text editor. You want to replace the embedded geometry text like the following 2 images.

Yeah, I've done that for years. Usually it worked - this time, possibly because I was working with a huge file and cut out something by accident, the parenting info was lost, but the really strange part was the way the UV maps were messed up - that shouldn't have happened, since it loaded the properly-mapped OBJs themselves. I was working with 1 parent and 8 or 9 child props in one PP2 - I think I might try saving each as an individual prop, update each with an OBJ reference, then load them from the library, parent them, and then save the set.

Yes, that is what you will want to do in the future, externalize the objs then do all the texturing, morphing and parenting afterward you load it back into poser.

There is the geometry stripper in freestuff. Automates the entire process. Been there since 2008 and still works fine.