I'm currently wrangling a complex OBJ+MTL (~16 MB) import via free PMX Editor from an MMD (PMX) freebie found on DA. It, in turn, had been ripped by 'NanaCookie' from another format.

Set is a very nice 'BeefBowl' cafe, Japanese style. Detailed mesh, lovely textures. Imports to Poser at ~4.5% original scale, auto-loads textures. Must lower to ground manually. Looks really, really good.

I need to find and set the glass doors and windows to mostly-transparent, the many ceiling luminaires to 'super ambient'.  And, perhaps, re-do the menus / posters. Unfortunately, the original rip renamed the model's PMX materials to 'Maps( 0 ~~ nnn)'. 800+ of them.

As you may imagine, PP_11.3's material room is not happy.

First, it lists all the materials as mo, m1, m10, m100, m101 etc. There seems no page-down, so verrrry lonnng scroll to eg m418, the first of first group of luminaires, identified by searching MTL with eg Notepad. Then, that done, Material Room starts again at m1. [ Expletives redacted...]

The next group of luminaires commences ~ m779...

Is there a way to hop from an 'opened' material to next/previous material, or directly to material of given name, eg m419 ?

Is there a 'search' option within Poser to list an object's materials with their 'called' textures, so I can reverse-engineer ?

Plan_B is to hack the MTL, set glazing transparency, and those luminaires to super-ambient.

Hmm: I'd better check if Poser 'traps' imported OBJ+MTL ambience settings >1 as 'invalid'...

{ More caffeine required... }

"Hmm: I'd better check if Poser 'traps' imported OBJ+MTL ambience settings >1 as 'invalid'..."

Set Poser primitive 'box' super-ambience as eg 10. Exports to OBJ+MTL with Ka 9.9  9.9  9.9. Re-imports as Ka 0 0 0

Seems it does...

{ Yet more caffeine required... }

Those types of files are the worst. Usually what I do is either take it into blender (or your favorite modeling program) and combine materials that should be combined and maybe rename them to something helpful. Or I only change only the ones I absolutely need to change. And to select those, I use the eyedropper in the material room to select those images. If they had meaningful names I'd say use the assign tab, but guessing which maps x choices would make that impossible.

Since this is a complex prop, I'm assuming it has many parts (like a room that include all the furniture as one prop) You might be able to use the grouping tool to separate different parts into different props. This way while there may not be meaningful material names, you only have to work with a few at a time.

You can drop objects and figures to the ground by clicking Ctrl+D.  Extensive material groups in Poser are a major pain with no way of isolating or finding specific material zones.  Your best bet is to identify each zone and association in the prop and consider if it is worth regrouping them into more compact material zones, i.e., all light fixtures as one zone.  The only drawback to doing this is if you want to use different light intensities throughout the model then one light zone would not be practical.  

For glass, and if you don't care about making it realistic, transparency would suffice but it also depends if you are using Firefly or Superfly rendering.  Look for real-world appearance, use Superfly, otherwise, stick to Firefly.

Thank you.

Upside, I can easily hack the MTL to give the glazing sufficient transparency.

Downside, I've discovered that PP_11.3 does not 'trap' MTL values at export, but certainly does at import-- And not ask...

This is mentioned in the other thread. I'm getting confused with you asking the same thing in two different threads and expecting different answers.

OBJ files are expected to be created with a corresponding MTL file. That's the standard as set by Wavefront when it developed the format for it's own use before it became a standard format used by others including Poser. If Poser encounters an OBJ file without a corresponding MTL file it will create one. No it does not ask you anything. That is not a problem or a fault of Poser. It is the standard for wavefront objects. Some software implements their version of the standard by not importing the MTL at the time the OBJ is but, again; this is not a feature of some software. It is an incomplete implementation for simplicity sake.

As mentioned above you need to take your OBJ into modeling software to fix the multi mats.

You seem to have the wrong idea about the OBJ/MTL file formats in regard to lighting. Illumination maps will not give any illumination. They do not define where an area of a mesh casts more light than another. They define where the mesh does not illuminate 100%. Like a transmap. for brightness levels on parts of a mesh. OBJ files denote 3D geometry only and as such the corresponding MTL file represents the light reflecting properties of that geometry. Light reflecting. That's it. No light emitting. That's why illumination maps don't define light intensity no matter what numbers you play with.

Thank you.

Although materials may be set a-glow using formal 'emission' via 'nodes', super-dialling 'ambient' still works. Albeit with same limited, area-dependent surface brightness.

I'm sorry for posting different aspects of my complex query in different places, call it 'Exasperation Spill-over'.

Whatever, there's no 'quick fix' via hacking the MTL due that undocumented import 'trap', and nimbly navigating 'Material Room' is beset by UI issues.

So, must do it the hard way: Learn 'nodes' beyond rudiments, dissect the OBJ...

The former because essential in P12+, the latter as I did something similar with a RM RE2 scene, a big freebie found on SCG. Had to split out the multiple luminaires as a separate material when 'ambient masking' did not work. Poser 'group' tool proved too clunky, I resorted to CAD...

Again, thank you all.

I believe that the Wavefront OBJ format specifies the maximum number of distinct materials as 512. However my experience has been that Poser's import can't handle that many. I'm not sure of the exact limit, but it's somewhere in the 300s. The way around that would be to split the mesh into separate sections so that each part has fewer material zones, and that would help a little with the material room navigation too.

As for your naming problem, my approach would be to hack the OBJ and MTL files as necessary. They may be inefficient, but in situations like these their  human-readable format makes search-and-replace relatively easy to do. You'll need a decent editor, of course: my recommendation is Notepad++.

"...but it's somewhere in the 300s..."

Ah, thank you: That would account for some additional weirdness, such as not being able to make the glass doors transparent...

FWIW, have been wrangling 'real-world' weirdness. We had an intermittent, utterly exasperating water leak behind kitchen range that did not match weather, sink, laundry or dish-washer use. First, I found the dish-washer fill-pipe had a 'sometimes' pin-hole leak, by getting a face-full when I wiggled it. Replaced that, less water appeared. Finally, right place, right time, I traced seepage to sink's thru-wall pipe, which had a hole inside wall. Apparently vermin damage, to our feline clan's chagrin. Fortunately, push-fit connectors, but sodden wall will need many weeks to dry out before I can back-fill with spray-foam. Meanwhile, dehumidifier is purring away...