If you want to learn more about UV Mapping in general, check out the tutorials in my TOTALUV forum at runtimedna. http://www.runtimedna.com/ then enter the TotalUV forum.

Thanks for the info everyone, and especially gebe for the details. I started to set up textures in Vue to use on imported figures, since it is easier to apply textures there than in Poser anyhow! Thought I might be able to reuse those over again in the future. I will try putting all the textures together in one folder though. I just hat having duplicates of files all over the place. ; ) So, my search for a native OSX rendering engine for Poser didnt turn out as streamlined as I had planned, but it seems like there are reasonable workarounds. Thanks everyone.

What the hell are you talking about? .Mac doesnt mean much of anything to Apple's success, Microsoft released OSX for Mac AFTER the contract expired, which is feature equal to the windows version, and anyone who would even buy quark already owns it and has it installed on systems that work just fine connected to high end equipment that wont be changed because it doesnt need to be because it works fine now. How many PC owners use Quark? Last I knew Quark wasnt a big ticket seller for Windows either. The print industry is not an important one right now. It's not growing or evolving. Other markets are far more important. And on that note, Jobs actually has done a great job of improving the machines, and you would know that if you looked any deeper than the tv adds. All of the machines are really loaded with features, and you would pay just as much for a PC with matching functionality. Mac's today use the same video cards, hard drives, ram and other hardware found in PC's so things arent as different as you would expect. Think you got a great deal on that new hard drive upgrade? Yeah, so did the mac user. Get over it. Anyhow, if you are so comfortable with your decision to buy the same machine as the majority of people did, why do you need to continue to bash Apple users? We are happy with our choice as well, and most of us know the Windows OS as well as you do and use it every day too. Apple has cash in the bank and a loyal following of customers, and they have never had more than 5 or 10 percent of the computer sales. Yet everyone thinks they are going to die tomorrow. Yeah, whatever. Dont flame me on this, I dont care. ; )

Wow... lets dont do this please. Everyone knows statistics are skewed. Sure Apple doesnt have a large market share but what there is represents over 25 million users. If you think in those terms things look a lot different. Also dont forget that a huge amount of PC's are purchased for office use where the numbers are even further skewed. Think of all the server farms, development test beds and other places with multiple PC's, then figure that a massive percentage of sold PC's are never going to run more than MS Office on them regardless of what you advertise and the numbers once again look much different. We cant run amok witch hunting with simple statistics or overviews. After all, Hitler was a vegetarian artist and Gengis Kahn could be called "the man with the active outdoor lifestyle". ; ) Being a dual platform person myself I feel confident with my previous bottom line; if developing for Apple is good enough for Newtek, Alias Wavefront, Adobe, Macromedia, e-on, Maxon and thousands of others it's also good enough for Curious Labs. ......... or maybe not. ; )

Will that be part of your "Pimp Clothes" product?

I saw it! ; ) Sure, nothing at all wrong, it's just a waste of disk space.

Yeah, Poser with pro pack runs fine in classic mode, but the plug ins do not, and that is the key functionality for me. The plug ins only work with the Lightwave and C4D when running under OS9.

Well, on a slightly different take to this topic I would like to say that as a Mac user I am not very interested in P5 anymore. Reasons: - If there is one, it wont appear for a long, long time and may be of questionable quality when it arrives. It will be hard to go back to Poser after I have the Mil figures rigged up in Lightwave. (which is almost done, BTW) - When it does arrive, will it have any support for sharing content to other programs? Firefly is nice, but its not Lightwave, C4D or Maya. - I already have limited use of PPP and P4 due to the lack of support for OSX, and thus value for the dollar does not exist in your current product. Frankly an OSX version of PPP would have been more useful to me than a current version of P5 without 3rd party program support. - I feel this delayed release is a clear statement of your lack of dedication to the Mac platform. With other 3D programs available I wont wait for a product developer that doesnt really want me to have a current toolset. My artistic expressions are not for you to schedule. As a Poser user since 1.0 I can say that Mac support and interest clearly died off the day OSX was released. - This is the biggest one. One of the most appealing reasons for buying Poser is the opportunity to develop content for the Poser community. Your choice to delay a Mac version has firmly locked all Mac developers out of that market opportunity. No ability to develop for P5 significantly while waiting for a Mac version. When it does arrive there will be another delay for learning curve and the market will already be flooded with products, further narrowing any opportunities. I cant even write tutorials for my own website, Poser Arcana, any more. With all that said, after complaining I will offer what I feel are solutions, which is the price one should pay for complaining. ; ) I always wanted Poser to be a plug in or stand alone content manager for other programs. It is the content and the ability to quickly select clothing, poses, etc that appeal to me. I dont really like the interface or the "room" metaphors, and the output options are less adequate than other software solutions. So you would have the metaphorical keys to the 3D kingdom if you created a program that managed this content and then blew it all out successfully into other programs to work with natively. With a solution like this your program becomes appealing and actually usable for users of any 3D software at any skill level, and the Poser content developers gain access to new markets and opportunities. This would be the first real industry standard 3D format/solution and would revolutionize everything. If I had any startup capitol or had the programming skills myself, this is what I would do. I have no ill will towards you CL, but I did want to express to you why you are loosing at least one long time Mac customer, and why even though Mac users are a "minority" our use of your program is significant far beyond simple sales volume. My best to you.

This problem seems an easy answer. Did you actually instal vicki2 in your P5, or share your P4 runtime library? If not, P5 will have no way to know where to find the stuff in your PZ3 file.

but that changed, too. Give the new renderer a chance. Once >people have read and understood the manual and applied the >patches, it should look pretty good. Nothing personal, but I think this is BS. A good renderer should render well even at default settings. Any "finessing" should be for some really stunning movie quality results, not just for decent render results. Not having worked with the rendering engine myself I wont be able to speak on it too much, but I can say that I have yet to be impressed by any images I've seen so far. Most figures still have a plastic dusty sort of look to them. People bitch about Maya's rendering engine yet it is still of high enough quality to be used for television and major motion pictures. Firefly is a far cry from that. I agree completely with budgie on this one. And I would add that a late P5 for Mac delivery really locks the Mac users out of the Poser market. There are limited products that can be in that pipeline and most of them will be in place by the time a Mac user get's their hands on the program, much less learns it. And in the mean time this decision could impact people that were earning significant part of their income from Poser content sales.

Yeah, that isnt going to happen. Or at least I would be really surprised. You know they are all dedicated to fixing windows bugs at this point, and CL has all but said that they knew the release wasnt ready when it went out the door which means more windows development time. I wouldnt count on seeing a Mac version before next summer, seriously.

All of the Macintosh pro-line of computers ship with dual processors. OH!!!!!!! But that doesnt matter does it!!!!! LOL

You know, PNG really isnt a good file format choice for saving your rendered images and textures in. TIFF is still the best choice for several reasons. PNG was created to address specific issues when using GIF and JPG images on the web, and was never really intended for use outside the web. And frankly, it's not widely supported on the web yet either! Here is something I wrote up on this a while back for someone else (You can guess who if you like). ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------- First off, while PNG files do of course look better than a jpg they will never be as small and file sizes balloon up very quickly at a ratio of approximately 5:1 larger in most cases. This is going to dramatically reduce the amount of available space on your CD's. Second, not all PNG implementations are created equal. Photoshop is well known to be the very worst use of the PNG format in a software tool, and I suspect most everyone contributing uses Photoshop. Judicious use of settings and the use of another software tool for image conversions can greatly reduce the file size of your PNGs. Here is an example from one image of some Yellow Canvas at only 512 X 512: FROM PHOTOSHOP 7 Canvas.tif - 800kb Canvas.png - 996kb Canvas.png with interlacing - 1,004kb We can see right away that PNG files saved from Photoshop are actually noticeably larger than TIF files on the average, and in no case should interlacing ever be used, especially since this is a feature intended for web needs. But using Imageready produces better results: FROM IMAGEREADY 7 Canvas.png - 664k Dont ask me why Photoshop 7 saves the same image with 332 extra unneeded kb! Photoshop 6 often does a worse job of compression than version 7 wil. Even better yet is the use of a non-adobe program. FROM GRAPHIC CONVERTER Canvas.png - 608kb Anyhow, just some examples that might be useful for you. PNG is really only useful when used correctly and unfortunately not all software tools implement it nor do users understand how or when to save images using the various bit depth options of the PNG format. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- There are also other issues, the most common being related to what you mentioned above. Often the background color will be saved as an alpha channel and show up as white in other programs. This is not at all a good thing! ; ) Best of luck.

The coolest text editor you could get would be BBEdit. They have a free 'lite" version that is still feature packed, and the full version is not very expensive. Check it out. http://www.barebones.com/ You can probably open these poser files in whatever you have now. The trick is to tell the program to open "any file" or "simple text" or something like that. The poser files are just ascii text files with unique extensions. If your program can read a .txt file it can read a Poser file.

True, OSX rocks the house, but the ProPack does not work under OSX so you are forced to work only in Poser4 for final output, or just import the models as OBJ and that is a pain in the butt. In other words, we Mac users are no better off than we were before. LOL