I have some figures that were created in pro pack. I recently installed p5 and when I open the figure in p5, the bump mapping is automatically channeled to the 'GRADIENT BUMP' shader. I want it to be channeled to the 'BUMP MAP' channel instead. Is there a utility that will convert the p4 cr2 file into p5 cr2 file with the bump mapping going to the correct channel? Thanks for your help, Davo

I don't think there's an automated way to do it, but Netherworks has a P5 MAT writer python script on his site. Once you plug the nodes in properly once, just run that and it'll generate P5 MAT poses.

Get MAT Pose Edit, in Free Stuff. Go to the file menu, and use the batch converter.

Davo, I've been using Mat Pose Edit as Ron's mentioned, but it does have it's limits. I loaded a p4 MAT of a belt with pouches and holsters, and it crashed everytime. Simple figures work fine. Doug

Hi guys, Thanks for your replies. I've downloaded MPE and as Doug mentioned, it crashes. I can't believe that such an obviously needed feature such as channeling bump mapping from p4 to p5 to the correct channel was overlooked. A few things I have observed in using p5: bump mapping comes in on the 'gradient bump' channel. you can disconnect and reconnect the node to 'bump mapping' manualy. If you do a p4 engine render, the bump mapping does not look so great. (I only want a p4 style render, I don't use firefly) If you use the p4 engine render with the "ignore shaders" option checked, the bump mapping looks perfect. (after you've changed them to the 'bump map' channel) If you leave the figure as-is, and don't change the bump mapping from gradient channel to bump map channel, and turn on the "ignore shaders" option, the bump mapping looks perfect during a render, however, if you touch any of the figures materials with the eyedrop picker in the material editor, or save the scene, exit poser, come back into poser and render again (with the ignore shaders button picked), the bump mapping will dissappear. In other words, once the scene is saved, it is saved with p5 shaders intact. This sucks. All I wanted was to be able to open my p4 scenes and figures and render with p4 engine 'AND' have the ability to 'scroll' down the libraries and access external runtime folders. To be quite honest, I'm dissappointed that after 4 service packs and the advent of Poser 6 coming out this year, that simple things like "being able to open an older version file and render without having to change anything" isn't an option. You may now return to you regularly scheduled programming... Davo