Since installing SR4, something seems to have gone wrong in how Poser 5 handles textures. You know how Poser can be set to display the textures while posing. If you change textures by a method which does not work through all the relevant materials in the Material Room -- MAT File, the "Apply to All" option, even editing the CR2 file -- the testures aren't shown. They do appear in the rendered version, but only in the render. If you go into the Material Room and just switch to the material, the texture appears. It doesn't seen to "stick" when next you load the character, or even, sometimes, when you save a new copy of the character and load that. Checking the files, they seem to have been saved with Mac EOL sequences. I shall have to check options in Poser, but this may be the reason. If so, I'm at a loss to see why the data save functions should suddenly be doing this. No, that doesn't make any difference... What puzzles me is that you don't have to change anything in the Materials Room, just look at the Material.

I think I may have got close to the cause. Poser 4 files were working fine, but not some Poser 5. So I did a comparison. Poser 4 doesn't use the Shader Tree system. Poser 5 does. And in Poser 5 a texture map is refeered to in at least two places, once in the section compatible with Poser 4, and once in the shader tree for that material. And there seems to be a difference in how the path/filename combination is stored. I strongly suspect the problem is in the Shader Tree, possibly in how Poser handles the path data for the file, but there may be other details I haven't found yet. And it's after midnight... Somebody else can worry about it now.

I'd had problems with P5 texture wonkiness even before installing SR4. That's just a P5 bug, I think. Sometimes, it won't let me change textures at all, even by hand, unless I close Poser and get back in.

When I've changed textures manually in the material room, the body parts I've altered don't show as shaded - they show as white meshes. When rendered they're textured OK. I mentioned it to a group of friends and they thought it might be resources but now I'm thinking it's the same bug ???

When you can't get a texture to change in the Material Room, go back to the pose room and select another figure, then reselect the one you want to change. Then go back to the Material room and try again. 90% of the time, this works for me. The Material room can also be slow about applying a texture on a copy and paste or a select all/apply to all. Try clicking on a different item, then clicking back to what you wanted to change. It sometimes forces it to apply. It's definitly wonkie.

It's a bug. It's the caching system -- it's not really super strong.

I wonder if I understand correctly and it is the same problem I have sometimes in Poser5. When I started creating textures and wanted to test them in Poser, I loaded the item I made a texture for, go in material room and change all the textures for the material zones in there.

Then I saved the document as a PZ3 or PZZ. When I reopen those files in Poser, the textures I applied do not show and the items I applied them to don't have ANY texture. I have to go in Material Room and click on every material zone to make the textures appear.

If I make a mat pose for my textures, I don't have that problem.

France

P.S. I can't say if it would have been the same without SR4 since I installed SR4 right after installing Poser 5 (without launching Poser 5).

Message edited on: 06/24/2004 01:41

Yup, there's a bug in the way P5 handles (some) materials on (some) meshes.
Load (some) figures that were saved looking OK, and they show up untextured in the preview (white, ceramic version).
Go to the Materials room, just LOOK at the relevant groups and the textures show up.
It's not a resource problem. I've had this occur consistently with some characters, after starting a complete new session (re-boot, open nothing except P5, load character into empty scene).

What I havn't tried ('cos I only just thought of it) is loading the character, getting all the preview texture to show, then re-saving the character...

Cheers,
Diolma

Message edited on: 06/24/2004 16:45

Well don't bother, I've tried it and it does the same thing when you reopen the document. As I said, the only thing that works is when I use a MAT pose to apply the texture. Then it will keep the texture when I reopen the document. France

Attached Link: http://www.hogsoft.com/

I think it may be something to do with how the Poser 5 versions of the .cr2 are saved. Poser 5 stores each material/texturemap combination in two places, first in the same way as Poser 4, and then in the shader tree data for that material. What I think is happening is that the P4-compatible entry stores the full path -- ":Runtime:textures:etc:filename" The shader tree entry sometimes comes out as just ":filename" And that is what seems to break things. (Make up a .cr2 with some distinctively-named texture files, and have a look for the filenames with the search function of a good text editor.) I'm not sure why the save should be different. Looking at how a texture file is selected in the Material Room, it seems that there can be two different references for the same file in the picklist -- one with the path and one with just the filename. Maybe it depends which you pick? Using CorrectReference seems to cure a lot of the problems. If you don't have it, go to the link: the original free version is downloadable from the site's front page without any hassles. I'm not a 100% certain that I've nailed down the problem, but I think I have a partial answer now.

AntoniaTiger: that seems extremely likely! I too have noticed the "dual" path names, and have sometimes had (other) problems if (when the same texture is applied to different parts) I pick the partial reference instead of the fully-qualified one. I just hadn't made the connection between that and the "white" figures. DOH!

If that IS the case, then replacing the offending materials in the Mat Room using the fully qualified paths then re-saving should cure the problem.

If not, I'll resort to text editor and try that.

(tomorrow..)

Cheers,
Diolma

Message edited on: 06/25/2004 16:54