picnic, as far as I know the texture templates (not the maps) are a free download. If you haven't got them yet for your purchased downloads, just go back to the Zygote store, click on the animal preview pic, and you will see an area "Texture Template Downloads" where you can get the template for free.

This is funny - I used version 5.5 as well! Are you sure that it extracts into just one folder "Poser 4" on your system? All my various 5.x's produce the bug. I checked the file "transcurls.zip" in question and found out what's going on: The .zip stores the access path for ":POSER 4:RUNTIME:LIBRARIES:CHARACTER:HAIR:Conform Curls Trans.cr2" in uppercase, but everything else in lowercase like ":Poser 4:Runtime:..." StuffIt obviously has a bug in one part making a case-sensitive check for the filename (accidently believing that "POSER 4" is different to "Poser 4"), but another part of the program renames it to "POSER 4.1" to prevent overwriting "Poser 4". The odd thing is that all directory paths are stored again at the end of the file, but this time all in lowercase. StuffIt seems to be the only expander that looks for the first occurence, everyone else takes the one at the end. Are there any .zip wizzards out there that know what's the reason for this double entry?

I just checked it myself. The PCF decoding is innocent, I'm quite sure it is simply lack of memory. When I first tried it with 70MB for Poser, I got a proper out-of-memory message at rendering (but no crash). Then I gave 150MB to Poser and it worked without trouble. A big "thank you" to Allerleirauh for this piece of work - this is the BEST hair I've ever seen in Poser !!! Sorry Peter, I'm afraid you will have to buy more RAM to see it... About the crash: Even if you're low on RAM, always leave at least 5-10 MB free for the System.

You can use my Maconverter utility to export any Macintosh Poser files to the full set of PC files - see the "expert" manual for details. The only further thing will be to get a .zip compressor, there are some shareware utilities for it, and StuffIt Deluxe 5.5 just started to offer it right now.

I just visited Aladdin's site and found the details for Deluxe 5.5 - they finally added .zip compression as well - hurray!!! So, if you are a Poser creator on Macintosh you should really think about buying/upgrading it now, and you never have to think about compression/expanding utilities again...

I totally agree with xeno in recommending the full package, but just to clear it up in detail: You don't have to buy it to expand .zip! The free expander (versions 5.1.x/5.5) from: http://www.aladdinsys.com/expander/index.html will expand the following formats free of charge: - StuffIt (.sit, .sea) - Private File (.pf) - Disk Images (.img, .smi) - BinHex (.hqx) - MacBinary (.bin) - UU (.uu, .uue) - Zip/GZip (.zip, .gz, .tgz) - TAR (.tar) (5.5) The StuffitEngine that ships with DropStuff (ShareWare) and StuffItDeluxe (Commercial) will further expand: - Arc (.arc) - AppleLink Package (.pkg) - Compact Pro (.cpt) - LHa (.lha, .lzh) - MIME/Base 64 (.mime) - TAR (.tar) (5.1.x) - Unix Compress (.z, .taz) The only one from this list that you might find in reality (as far as Poser goes) will be LHa, and there is a free expander (MacLHa) for that as well (don't ask me where... but the format is very popular in Japan). Nevertheless, if you can afford it - buy Deluxe. You can edit the .sit archives, and drag in/out any files you want straight into the Finder - just this is already worth every penny!

No problem, because I actually was successful in deleting my (mistyped) message, but I got the "violation" message immediately afterwards when I was hitting "reload" to see the updated page. Just wanted to let you know that/how it happened.

This question is not dumb at all... .sit is the standard Macintosh file compression format, but there is an expander for Windows as well. You can get it for free from: http://www.aladdinsys.com/expander/index.html

By the way... there is a similar problem on the PC as well! My ISP forces me to call my pages something.phtml, and I usually check it with IE 4 on PC. Unfortunately IE will not open it, because it has the wrong extension. So I have to rename it first to something.htm (Windows tells me that this might damage the file), open it, and then rename it back (Windows tells me that this might damage the file). Glad that the big software companies keep us busy and entertained...

Foxhollow, well,... (almost) all we are talking about here are different looking icons... If you double-click on a .txt file you will always launch one and the same application on Windows. On a Mac you can have 30 different TEXT files, all with different icons and all linked to individual programs. Of course you can open them with any app you like, but the double-click will always start the one it belongs to. And a textfile will always be one, even if you rename it to something like bogus.exe! You get so much used to this, that you start getting annoyed if there is just a single file that you want to belong to BBEdit but is actually linked to SimpleText... and so we are going through GREAT trouble to figure out complex re-mapping schemes to get it all setup automatically... :-) (Douglas Adams wrote about this phenomenon in "Last Chance to See" - highly recommended reading!) As a wise man once said: "If I only got YOUR problems"...

Peter, you could try to open the "Internet" control panel (for System 8.5ff) or the "InternetConfig" application and look for something like "suffix mapping" - but better be careful, you must know about MIME types and all those technical bits to avoid making it worse... About this "PC icon" thing in Maconverter: They are used whenever there is no "natural" mapping for Poser related files. SimpleText is a poor choice for .obj files, because they are bigger than 32k in 99.99% and SimpleText will refuse them (it is only intended for small read-me's). Setting the "mdos" creator was the best choice for me, because it is not occupied by any real application - whenever you double-click, EasyOpen will ask you which app you want to open it with. You might want to have a look at EasyOpen's various settings, once customized to your needs it is a wonderful helper.

StuffItExpander is using InternetConfig (or just Internet for Systems 8.5ff) to map the filetypes, so probably the SoftWindows link is set there. There are so many programs that try to add their prefs to it that the file list can get messed up quite easily.

I was just re-reading the whole stuff, and with all this mood of understanding and care in the posts (not to mention the thread title which shows nothing but good intentions) I realized that my last one may sound offending... It's not, I just wanted to explain why I probably misunderstood the "language" remark. If this board would allow to edit messages, I'd probably skip 1) right now. Apologies.

Wiz, about the "language" bit... I don't like it that words are extended and extended until every word means everything and nothing at the same time. I think if a developer says "language" he means it, and the same applies for "SDK" and "GUI". The words mean something specific, and I think it is useful this way. CodeWarrior is a SDK for me, and C++ a language. Sorry for being a bit fundamentalistic about this...

You can use the (very few) "Mac only" .sit files, you only have to get the expander for it. It is at http://www.aladdinsys.com/expander/index.html in a Windows version. The extracted files will have some restrictions - mainly missing thumbnail pictures. I think you can live with this, Mac users lived with it for a very long time. The reason why you can't create Mac versions on a PC are the different file systems. The Mac file system has some additions which the PC structure can't setup. Sorry for that. It's not my fault. And just to make it very clear: My remark to 5) was a joke. As in :-) I will never do such a nasty thing. Honestly!