If it's really a zip, you only need to double-click to unzip. But did you perhaps buy a Renderosity CD with this zip on it? I'm curious because of the "into RenderosityCDMake". Never having gotten such a CD I don't know how they name the CDs they burn with products or the directory structure on them... but if you're trying to unzip in place from a CD, it would complain because the CD is read-only. If so, try simply dragging the zip file off the CD first. However, you should consider getting the dittoGUI free utility; just set the destination folder to Poser's main directory, and drag any zip file onto it then click "ditto". Easiest way to install you can get. (And you won't have to copy the zip file off the CD first.) Now, if your zip really isn't on a CD, then most likely the file is corrupted... in which case you should try to find an original copy. (You should still be able to re-download from your Renderosity account page.)

The freestuff link no longer works

Huh. You're right. I suspect that if you get in touch with fmorgan through his member page, you could get a corrected link. However, I'm certainly not going to try to discourage you from giving him $5 encouragement for his past and hypothetical future efforts. ;-)

Attached Link: http://www.renderosity.com/freestuff.ez?Form.Contrib=fmorgan&Topsectionid=0

The old maconverter runs only in Classic (you'd need OS 9 installed, which not everyone has nowadays), and creates old-fashioned file resources. PoserMacConverter changes the archaic PC-specific .rsr files into portable .png files, and runs in Mac OS X native.

fmorgan also sells a MacPoserBrowserPRO package in the marketplace that will help with installation as well. I bought it, but for installation I usually just use "ditto -xk *.zip /Applications/Poser 6" from a Terminal window. (But be careful that the zip is really rooted at "Runtime"; some are at "libraries", while a very few include the enter PC Poser application path from "Program FilesPoser 6...".)

Aside from the crufty rsr files, very few Poser zip packages require any "conversion" at all (and no rationally packaged P5/P6 packages, which have png previews). For P5 and P6, maconverter, as useful as it was for years, is overkill, even aside from requiring Classic. Curious Labs kept the Mac and PC versions of Poser 4 pointlessly and artificially incompatible (and even worse that pesky PC-specific rsr file is actually a Mac-specific file format deliberately broken so the Mac won't read it). For PP and P5, they wised up and stopped doing that.

I believe PCs can use much longer pathnames than Macs.

Until Windows 98, PCs true filenames were "8.3" -- eight characters plus a 3 character file type (like ".doc"). Meanwhile, Macs (pre Mac OS X) had always allowed 31 characters -- pretty generous for a personal computer in 1984. Windows 95 added hackery on top of the DOS FAT file system to pretend to have 255 character filenames; but because they all were really 8.3 names with a mapping table, and didn't work on still common Win 3.1 systems, they weren't widely accepted until Windows 98 provided native long filename support with FAT32. Mac OS X, which is UNIX, also supports 255 character filenames. But even on Mac OS X, Poser 4 (a "Classic" application) was subject to the old filesystem rules. Poser 5 and Poser 6 shouldn't be subject to the old limit; and if they are, it's entirely their own fault. (Just as if they supported only the old 8.3 format on Windows.)

It would appear that Poser simply isn't allowing enough space to display long file paths in this dialog. That's odd, since I know I've had missing textures and the desired name was quite clearly readable.

"PC only" is most commonly used by people who don't know any better. There are very few things that are really "PC only". Poser's Python GUI support differs between Mac and PC (because Poser used a package that was PC-specific), so there are "PC only" Python scripts. There are also, very rarely, products that come in self-extracting .EXE files rather than standard .ZIP files that can be expanded anywhere. There are old Poser 4 PC packages with .RSR previews that the Mac version of Poser doesn't process (ironically since they're really a Mac-specific graphics format that Poser ported to PC without the header data).

There also some Poser pose/prop files that are packaged with full PC file paths like C:Program FilesPoser 5Runtime... instead of the normal "Runtime:..." format. Of course those won't even work on a PC if Poser was installed on the D drive, or they have Poser 6 instead of Poser 5, etc.; they're not so much "PC only" as just badly packaged.

Sometimes Poser products modify copyrighted geometry using encoded packages that can't be used without special software and the original copyrighted mesh (e.g., DAZ V3). Long ago, MacConverter was the only widely available Mac utility to decode these, and it only handled a subset. Now there's a free cross-platform Java RTE decoder, and there's also an Objaction Mover for Mac.

So with the exception of a few Python scripts, "PC only" is just a bug in the package that could have been easily avoided -- or simply mislabeling.

Where can I get a hold of Poser Content for Apple Mac?

With Poser 5 and Poser 6, the only "final form" Poser content that's not equally at home on Mac and PC is old PC packages that rely on .rsr previews (which are, ironically, really Mac-specific PICT images hacked so they aren't recognized by Poser on a Mac). They'll work fine, but you won't see a preview unless you convert it. Mac Converter will add a resource fork preview, Mac OS 9 style; or MacPoserBrowser (another freebie) will convert to a standard PNG preview that will work on either platform. The other occasional problem is a busted Pose file with a full file path like "C:Program FilesPoser 6Runtime..." instead of the normal standard and portable format. They're easy to fix with a text editor. (And would be just as much of a problem on a PC if you'd installed to a different place, for example on a D: drive as some do.)

I've had time to try 3 separate scenes that had foiled SR1; renders had reliably crashed every time, and the body part and material popup menus were completely fried. With SR2, the popup menus work flawlessly. One of the 3 scenes still crashes, unfortunately; but the other 2 render nicely. So it's not perfect, but it's a big improvement.

The popup menus now work. My render hasn't crashed yet, but hasn't had time to finish, either. I never had the "dialogs stuck behind" problem, but it seems now that may have been a symptom of an incompatible DivX plugin in the first place. Basically, the obvious problems I'd had before are gone. The fact that my render (on which I'd given up after numerous attempts) is a good sign but not yet conclusive. So at worst, it's substantially improved over SR1.

The big problem I have with Poser 6 is that apparently Dynamic Clothes don't work.

They work fine for me. Hair, too. Although I've sometimes had problems getting P6 to "clothify" some clothes. Sometimes it won't try; sometimes it pretends to try but isn't successful. But most items, in most scenes, clothify fine, and simulations run (not necessarily quickly), with excellent results. So again; everyone's getting different problems, in different areas of the program. Frustrating for us, but also tough for them no doubt.

I have problems with P6 on Tiger, sure. But I had exactly the same problems before Tiger (and before Poser 6 SR1, which fixed no problem I ever encountered); and for that matter I had all the same problems with P5. I've never had the "hidden dialog" problem that seems most common. Don't think I'm suggesting its your imagination or anything -- I'm just saying that it's NOT a universal problem, and that may make it hard for them to reproduce reliably. And a problem that can't be reliably reproduced is hard to fix. The problems I've had consistently since P5 (like pulldown menus that contain irrelevant junk rather than what they should) may be equally non-universal and difficult to reproduce. I can't imagine what their priority could be beyond fixing such bugs; but so far as I'm concerned they're in no danger from D|S until and unless DAZ has a reasonably priced plugin(s) for dynamic hair and clothes. I'd say something dramatic like "without that, D|S is just a toy"... but, technically, for me, they're both just toys anyway. ;-)

I'd rather have a separate window with a treeview like the hierarchy window

That's a good point. So who's played with DAZ Studio? There IS a popup you can use, if you want; but there's also a dockable palette with a hierarchical list of everything in the file; and of material zones in a figure; etc. In fact, I might be using DAZ Studio much more than I do (and likely more than Poser), except that I will not give up dynamic hair and clothing.

Pulldown menus that actually work reliably, even with "big" scene files. Better dynamic clothing controls -- no more zero pose, zero morph junk... there's no reason the program can't handle that mapping automatically. Still image draping should "just work". If you want stills with wind effects, fine; a short animation is fine; but the vast majority of Poser users never animate and requiring an animation for even the most basic dynamics is dumb and pointless. (That of course goes for hair as well as clothes.) Stability, speed. After that, background rendering would be great... I'd like to be able to work on new scenes while one renders. Why not a batch queue? And then they can tie into a network rendering system. That'd be fine. (Ideally with an autoconfiguring grid infrastructure.) Better library management! This is pragmatically difficult without changing the file format -- but maybe that'd be worthwhile. I'd love to be able to look at any arbitrary prop, conforming clothing item, character MAT/MOR file, hair figure, and have Poser tell me on which figure it works. Vicki 3, David, GIRL, HIM, James, Jessi, whatever. Right now, you might make inferences for morphs from mesh groups, but that doesn't generalize well; and you might do image outline diffs of MAT files against UV mapping templates, but that also doesn't generalize well (especially for MATs where the artist doesn't bother to color inside the lines ;-) ). A good start might be for Poser to be able to install its own zip file at a particular root in the hierarchy. That is, "install this hair as a Vicki 3 hair prop", etc. And why do I need to have "Read-Me", "ReadMe's" and "ReadMe" directories PLUS a bunch of zips that just dump their readme files into the Poser app's root folder? Sure, external tools can help some of this, and some have been written that approach aspects of the problem from various directions; it ought to be built in.

Many people have said "dynamic for loose clothing", "conforming for tight". I've nearly given up even on conforming for tight clothes because in some ways it's even worse than loose -- one tiny morph that's not in the clothing, or a bend that's a little too extreme, and you get poke-through. "Second skin" clothing is a good compromise for tight clothing with distance rendering, but looks awful for closeups. Dynamic clothing is "real" clothing (although Poser's implementation is far from perfect -- either in setup or simulation) that works with any morph or pose. I'd like to see the dynamic clothing model dramatically improved (especially doing simulations for still shots, which ought to be a lot easier than it is; and being able to fit to morphed bodies without the current messing around); but even so it's easier to use than comforming clothing with anything but the most trivial morphs, and the results are far superior. When I see conforming clothes that look interesting, I tend to say... well, no; I don't need anything more that's not dynamic. (Nevermind that as a somewhat casual hobbiest user I've got far more "stuff" of EVERY description than I can really justify on any conceivable basis, anyway... ;-) )

Good for his parents. In any case, if he's got Poser 5 or Poser 6, there's no need for conversion because Curious Labs now supports common data formats on both platforms. If he has to deal with older PC-specific formats, fmorgan has a couple of free cleanup utilities that don't require running MacConverter in Classic mode. If he's stuck with an ancient Mac and Poser 4, of course that is sad; almost as bad as being chained to Windows. ;-)

I wish Apple would give us the option of having file copying & moving work the way Windows does it. (Blasphemy, I know! ;) )

Note, "the way Windows does it" is also the way UNIX has done it since long before MacOS or Windows. And Mac OS X is, after all, UNIX. The directory replacement behavior comes from the traditional MacOS filesystem. (I don't know if Apple changed the UFS [default UNIX] filesystem to behave the same way, and hardly anyone uses UFS on MacOS mostly because it's case-sensitive while many Mac [and Windows] programs, especially nearly all games, seem to rely on case-INsensitivity.) I would suspect they did change UFS, because the inclusion of NeXT "package" technology complicates this issue. A "package" is really a directory, but the system treats it as a file. (It's more or less the "next best thing" replacement for the old MacOS resource forks.) Replacing part of a package, or adding files to an existing package, would generally be a bad idea. (Though there's no reason, in principal, that the copy couldn't be sensitive to whether the directory was a package.)

KDoug and estherau refer to a GUI 'ditto', which sounds useful (though I wasn't able to locate either name). However if you're comfortable with the UNIX command line, (i.e., via Terminal.app), it comes down to just the 'ditto' command, which can unpack a zip archive and store the files into a directory tree without overwriting the directories (i.e., without deleting existing files unless the archive replaces each file explicitly).

You can install most normal Poser packages (where the root directory in the zip is Runtime rather than "libraries", or "Poser 6") with this:

ditto -xk poserstuff.zip /Applications/Poser 6/

If you're not sure, you can see the contents with the command:

unzip -l poserstuff.zip