This was a set of archers props. I was working on about 2 years ago. This is the bow from that set.

The bow has a morph to draw it and when it draws the arms pull back and down in an arc as a bow really would do.

I am however having a texture problem ... when i load one of the textures it loads fine. but i can't switch between textures. as soon as i load a texture once it will grey out and poser won't let me select it again .. anyone have any idea why?

an odd note .. it's only happening with these textures .. i loaded the uthena dress textures to put on a dress .. and the bow will let me apply the texures and switch thru them at will... (they of course don't fit and don't look good.. but poser will let me switch the textures.) really really odd.

That bow looks great! Very nice recurve. About the textures: what file format do they use? It may be some JPEG format that Poser doesn't like. You could try the textures in TIF format, or even .BMP format, and see what happens.

That is a new one. Have you tried using a MAT pose to see if the textures can be reused that way?

i don't know how to do mat poses.. The textures were in JPG format originally. I tried converting them to Tiff and it does the same thing with the tiffs. i'm wondering if photoshop didn't stash something in the original JPG that is just carrying on from format to format and causing me grief.

One of the Photoshop features is including a thumbnail in the image file itself. Maybe that's it?

What are the filenames of the textures? Poser is known to have "issues" with certain characters/symbols.

hrmmm.... nope ... tried resaving without the built in thumbnail even converted it to bmp which doesn't get the option and it still greys out after i load the texture.

looking into that now ... i know the filenames have paenthasies in them.

wooo hoo that was it thank you thank you thank you Little_Dragon!!!

You're welcome. Parentheses are a big no-no.

Great work you're doing here Mordikar ! Can't wait to put my hands on such a fantastic new toy !

Truly bizarre. Are parentheses not allowed in filenames on the fruit computer I wonder and that's the reason? I was right in a way though. I tried it with the one paren containing texture I had and it does become inaccessible--new figure, new project, it stays greyed out no matter what. BUT, put that texture in a MAT file and it will work! Apparently the hang-up is only in the material UI, not in the internal code to set the texture. Mordikar, if you're going to hacve different texture options, you may well want to provide MATs to easily change them anyway. Get MAT Pose Edit from freestuff--makes them easy to create.

A word of caution if you are going to try mat poses: If the bow is a figure you shouldn't have any problems but if it is a prop, smart prop it to a figure or the pose probably won't work.

ok will look into it ... i'm looking at a bow, quiver, arrow, dagger, and sheath and i have 3 texturesets i want to build for each item. I had thought about figureing out mat poses .. i just hadn't got that far .. lol Then again i also want to morph the strap on the quiver to make it fit p4 fem and male, vic3 and mike3, and maybe mayadol and aiko.. i'm not real sure how i'm gonna pull that off without moving the object .. this may be interesting ... :) Thank you Vilian :) I'm glad to finally be giving some stuff back to the community ..

hrmm.. that might be a problem nickedshield. The bow is a smart prop, the dagger is a smart prop, the quiver WILL be a smart prop the sheath is not a smart prop, neither is the arrow... Hrm....

"...smart prop it to a figure or the pose probably won't work." Good point. Props have to be parented to a figure for MATs to work on them.

Don't know about the sheath but you're probably not going to have different arrow textures, right--or wrong? :-)

No, it's not an Apple problem. I would imagine it's due to how Poser parses it files and filenames. I would imagine I would be very unhappy if you put { in the filename also.

There is a simple solution if you have PP, P5 or P6: load a ball prop go into the setup room, create a single bone for the ball save as a figure. After parenting whatever you need, turn off cast shaodow and turn invisable and save back to the figures library. I thought there was something already in the free stuff to do this but don't remember what it was called.

well i'm stuck with poser4 .... i guess i'll have to figure out some whay to parent the items ... i really wanted the sheath and arrow to be unparented so they could be moved ar will .. arrow flying thru the air .. or the sheath placed on the thigh, or arm, or back instead of the hip ... :( I've noticed that even if i do them as smart props if i load just the prop without any figure to parent to the mat files don't work. Kinda made making the rsr's for the mat pose files interesting ..

I'll bet there's a good solution. Just post pictures of the set and say you won't release it 'til one is found :-) Maybe there's a way to have different poses to move the sheath from one parented location to another. "Kinda made making the rsr's for the mat pose files interesting .." You mean showing just the item? Can you just set the figure invisible and render?

well if it's parented and you hide the figure all attached props vanish as well.

So what i did was load just the bow and manually loaded each texture and rendered and exported as a psd .. then followed the tut on DAZ for making custom rsr's ... but it was manually loading the texture that was the fun part..

the problem is i didn't think of doing that until i had manually made half of posette invisible by turning off visibility on individual body parts.

Message edited on: 04/20/2005 16:42

If you would like I could send the ball figure I just made.

That would be cool. My email address is mordikar(at)earthlink.net

OK. Give me a few minutes to zip it up and write some directions for you.

"well if it's parented and you hide the figure all attached props vanish as well." Drat! Make a MAT to turn the Posette transparent. It may come in handy for something else :-)

sorry compression murdered the images .. but you get the idea :)

Those are some wicked looking knives! Cool textures too. It may be possible to re-parent a prop using a pose file, going to look into that this weekend. Could be useful for the sheath, the knife (left hand - right hand - sheath parents?) the quiver, the arrow, and so on. I'll try and see what I can come up with. Love this stuff, even if the textures are mangled by the compression.

I sent him/her a figure that may help with the creation of the mat pose but haven't heard if it worked or not.

well nickedshield that cause i havn't tried it yet ... i was getting the quiver out of rhino and into poser .. and making textures for the knife and sheath. As of right now the quiver has 7 morph targets that i have proudly made myself. each one will fit, shape and reposition the quiver for a diffrent figure. So far i have Posette P4Male Vicky3 Mike3 Don Judy Aiko3 and i'm about to do one for MayaDoll. Just puck your figure and set the morph dial to 1 and presto!

had to take my quiver to a freinds computer who has p5 so i ould get the on and judy morphs done .. but they are done so it's back to my good old happy p4.

i think i'm just going to parent the sheath to hip for the purpose of doing the mat poses. nicked do not think your work has gone for naught .. i still have to do the arrow... and this neat little figure will be of great use for other objects i have in the planning stage.

Ah, at least it was of some use.

hrmm... ok the ball figure isn't working .. nothing parented to it will take the mat poses ... grumbles .. i'm probably doing something wrong .. i've had a migrane most of the day ... i'll try it again tommorow.

email me when you feel better. I think I know what might be happening.

Woo hoo got another interview today .. this time for Perot Systems Inc ... crossing fingers .. Unfortunately tht means i won't be able to poserize today.

unfortunately it looks like theres a flaw in the bow morph ... the strin doesn't pull out al the way to where it attaches and theres a segment on each end of the string that followes the recurve of the bow instead of pulling back like it should .. which means once i get the morph rebuilt i get to reposerize it and apply it to the bow, and then reposition and parent the bow and resave it as a pp2 ... :( grumbles .. once that's done then all i'll have left is the arrow. I think i'm gonna do all 3 arrorws the same with a tan wooden shaft, and a brushed metal head, and just change the colour of the flights on each arror to match the red/gray/blue for the appropriate set ... i think it'll look better than me trying to do black, brown, and tan coloured woods for the shaft...

I think that'll look more natural. The red and black one is cool. Good luck with the job hunt. It ain't easy these days.

well the good news is that the archery pack is finnished! The bad news is .. zipped up it's 10 megs. that's mostly the fault of the quiver. with the 8 morphs loaded the quiver.pp2 ends up at 15 megs. not sure the file size is appropriate for a free stuff item or not.