Ajax, a lot of people look up to you in this community, so you should be careful with your lecturing others when you clearly don't understand the fundamental difference between UV mapping and all other kinds of mapping (and there are several OTHER kinds of mapping). Without at least understanding what UV(W) mapping really is, the question raised on this thread about the significance of the W coordinate cannot be addressed. I don't wish to be argumentative, and I sincerely want to know how Poser processes the UV information (because it clearly IS a bit different from other programs). The difference between Poser and other programs is NOT however, what you suggest and has nothing to do with UV mapping per se - that much I KNOW. Here is the simplified example of the real difference between UV mapping and other mapping: Let's say you have a simple 3D object like a cube that normally has 6 sides or faces (triangulated = 12 faces). With non-UV mapping we can apply a material (texture map or not) to any of those 6 faces and that material will automatically be stretched (or tiled - or "decaled") from diagonal corners of the face (ie: the only coordinates referenced in the "mapping information are the 2 diagonal points in space that define the extent of the "surface") - sounds simple enough, and at this point would appear identical to UV mapping which would do the same thing. But if we take one side of the cube and subdivide the polygons to get a higher density mesh we end up with a rectangular plane that has a "grid" of vertices within it. Then we start moving those vertices in the middle of the grid around (morphing them - but leaving the outside square edges alone) Here is where we will see the difference between UV mapping and all other mapping. Lets imagine that you had a smiley face mapped to the side of the cube. With UV mapping applied, if you move the internal grid of points around, you could make the smile turn to a frown or raise an eyebrow. Without UV mapping, however the smiley face would keep smiling and staring straight at you, because it is only mapped corner-to-corner on the face of the cube. And THAT is essentially what UV mapping is: A method of mapping a texture to individual vertices rather than to an area defined by a material. To say that you wish Poser would use the "other" method of mapping is silly, because realistic human skin texturing just would not be possible without UV mapping - not to mention the fact that the texture would not "follow" a morphed figure. Now I agree that Poser IS different from some other apps that support UV mapping because it combines materials onto a single image map. But Poser is NOT alone in this - many 3D games do the same thing for a very good reason - it speeds up rendering and reduces processor load. Even so there is nothing explicit about UV mapping that says you have to have one texture or many textures - it is just a choice made by the person mapping the original mesh. The downside in Poser is that changing just one element of that map like a lip texture becomes a pain in the butt, and requires either your merging your favorite lips with your favorite skin OR wasting a lot of processor power loading a mostly blank texture with just lips on it OR remapping the lip material of the figure thus creating a new obj file. You are right that in architectural modeling, non-UV mapping is preferred, because it is great to tile a small concrete texture over a large area, and produce a realistic result. The human body, however is nothing like a sidewalk or a stucco wall because repetative or tiled skin textures look unrealistic and flat. Ground textures and some clothing items could be a different story, and I sometimes wish it were easier to "tile" a small sample texture within Poser - but I would never trade UV mapping for that. You're also right about it looking like Poser 5 will support material procedures, and shaders (and all that implies like tiling and fractal methods) but I guarantee that they don't do it at the expense of UV mapping. Now the real question is whether all this power will be part of the built-in rendering engine, or is it just a call to an external render app (like renderman) that we have to purchase separately? Even so, it looks like a MAJOR overhaul of Poser, and I'm twitching with antici........ ...pation.