So I've been collecting stuff from ALL over the place and it's hard to keep up with where everything is, what clothing piece a texture goes with, skin files out the wazoo....not to mention my recent venture into creating my own and all that other jazz...Everyone seems to be doing mat poses for stuff now and I've found a few tutorials on creating them, but it's only for parts of objects (like victoria and changing materials on her body) Since I have a few objects (like the eve platform shoes from the free stuff section) and they come with mat pose files for the object...but I would like to create my own. I have about a million texture files for the p4 biker shorts or catsuit and it's hard to change all the textures and yada yada yada (you get the idea.) Are there tutorials on how to create a mat file for an entire piece (like the catsuit or biker shorts) or can someone tell me the proper technique on how to do it.

At Posert Arcana you can find some tutorials. There also is a programm to make MAT poses in Freestuff made by Scourge. Search on this name. Hope this helps.

I looked through the tutorials at Poser Arcana, the only one I found used Vicki as the model with using skin mat files, not creating them. Perhaps I did not look in the right place...

I just downloaded the MAT poses program, but it says that a required dll is missing...

Check the readme.html file. It gives you directions about the missing dll's. It should work fine then. The first time it starts it asks for your the directory where Poser.exe is located. This is usually x:program filescurious labsposer4, where x is the drive letter.

Thanx gladiator...I think lack of sleep and too much Mountain Dew is starting to effect me LOL I didn't even realize it was a readme because it wasn't a txt file. DOAH! Another stupid question (or two actually) 1) Is there a limit to how many figures/objects/poses/etc that you can have loaded in Poser? and 2) Is there a way to change the picture, because with transparencies it just shows up as little dots and not what the actual object is when it's rendered.

For Poser there is no limit on the number of figures and props. Your PC's memory is the limitation. Yuo will notice that everything is slowing down if you reach the limits. To get a better picture you can change to cartoon mode. Though I prefer to change the transparancy slider to 0 when I'm posing and change it again to 100 for rendering.

Well yeah, that's true, but when you're creating underwear out of the biker shorts, there is no way to get the idea of the texture if the transparency is off...I just want to change the thumbnail in the library, is there a way to do that?

In this situation, the easiest way to make such a thumbnail is to do a nice render of the biker shorts, then save it as an image file. Load the image into a paint program, crop and resize it to 91x91, then save it as a .png file. If you're using Pro Pack, your work is done; you have your thumbnail. If not, you have to convert the .png to an .rsr file, using yarp's Rsr2Png Converter plugin for P3dO Explorer, available at SENO Software.

Man this is getting more complicated...ok, I downloaded P3dO and it won't open. When I click on the exe file it just sits there....

It's packaged as a WinZip self-extracting executable. Maybe you could open and install it manually with WinZip (or StuffIt, etc.). Or do you mean you've already installed it, and it won't run?

I've already installed it.... but I think something happend when I downloaded it, I redownloaded it under a different name, unzipped it and installed and it works now...(it's funny how simple things always seem to flee my mind...My mom keeps saying I make everything harder than it really is)

To save into a library with a decent thumbnail (not my invention): Set up and render the view you want. Display>Paste into background Use the camera mover (the four pointing hands) to slide the camera forward until only the background is visible Save your figure or whatever to the library

Hrmm, that would work easier than the other way, but won't you lose the settings for just the materials that way?

If you mean "how to make a pose file that can change a model's material colors?", there is such a pose file in the new version of my Gerry Anderson UFO series alien model. It sets the model's material colors and also assigns a color texture map file.

Well, I did figure out how to do it by using MAT Pose, it seems to work really well in fact. (Now I just worry about how many files I can create)and to get a decent thumbnail I took the render into P3dO, by taking a render of the finished product, whipping into PS, resizing it (and adding a different pretty background) and pasting it into P3dO. It's a little tedious, I'll admit, but in the end I think it's worth it. (Especially when you've got a bazillion textures running all over gods green earth trying to find) LOL

I recently upgraded my computer, and this time I decided to try and set up all my (numerous) Poser files in a sensible and easy to find manner. To help this, I decided to cull character files whose only purpose was to change textures and use MAT poses instead (and to replace some custom characters by adding the morph channels to the base figures using MorphManager and then creating MOR files for the face and body). With Poser Pro Pack, creating the MATs and thumbnails is easy. I bought the MK Scripts from DAZ. I use the whiteout script to change the figures base colours, apply all the appropriate textures, rename the figure appropriately (e.g. Dragon) and then use the materialise script to make a MAT file. Now for the thumbnail - set render options to render in new window, 91 x 91 pixels antialiased. Set up pose and camera then render. Now save rendered image as PNG over the top of the one created by the materialise script. Open P3DO and rename the MAT file and we're done. I've got about half my library done so far, and I'm steadily working through the rest as I either need them or feel too drained to try anything creative. - Mark

Attached Link: http://www.renderosity.com/messages.ez?Form.ShowMessage=198393

Yes, my passed-on method would save a full pose file to go with the RSR, rather than a MAT, but as far as I can tell Poser just uses the filename to associate RSR and ??2 files so you could save your preview-ed version with a temp name, delete the PZ2 and rename the RSR to match your newly created MAT file. I hadn't thought of the drawback in this case, but it is a useful trick generally since getting thumbnails is a common request.

That would save on a lot of time with other things though. I think in this case the longhand version might be better (Since I am still learning all the filename extentions, where they go and what they do) and Anthony, that would be awesome, provided I had pro pack, which I can't afford at this time. Although any helpful ideas on organizing would be of great help. With so much stuff available (and I do have a rather large hard drive, so space isn't a problem) I have had a hard time keeping things together. I tried to keep all textures in one folder, seperated into texture types (which is now just a bloody mess) and skin files in their own folder...but just trying to remember everything is a pain.

And what is Morph Manager and where do you find it?

I haven't got PPP. I put the materials in the pose file with a text editor.

Yes, do check out the MAT creation Utility, it's recently been upgraded to handled Hair and Prop files (props only work if they are a smart prop). It's now an invaluable utility on my desktop!!! Liz Pope Dreamspinner Inc.

Morph Manager 4.0 is a freeware utility that allows you to tinker with and transfer morphs from one character to another. It's one of those essential tools that every Poser user should have.

It's found in the Miscellaneous Downloads section of the 3D Comic Collective. Here's a link:
Morph Manager