This is a bit long-winded, but I needed to explain a couple of things.

I'm updating a character, so firstly I moved the old texture folder out of Runtime to the Poser root. I created a new folder with the same name as the old one in Runtime:Textures, and moved my updated textures there.

My MAT file, which references the textures, hasn't changed or been moved. Apply the MAT and render - and the image appears with the old textures.

OK: I know where I've gone wrong. The MATs point to

":Rosie:Rosie_V3_Body.jpg"

instead of "Runtime:Textures:Rosie:Rosie_V3_Body.jpg"

and so on, and because of this, Poser looks for the first file with that name it finds. I've learned that since I did the original figure. But, unless i've missed something, this means that Poser has looked for, found and used files that are outside of its own runtime structure.

Now - assuming you've not lost the will to live... other than being an object lesson in referencing files properly, has anyone else had this, and is it anything other than a minor Poser quirk?

Sounds like everything is working as it should. The "runtime:textures:" should be there, otherwise Poser will do what you described. I would recommend moving the old textures into something like "runtime:textures:rosie:old".

I think I may have noticed something like this at one time but didn't really think anything of it. It makes sense in a way. I think A lot MATs use the format ":Runtime:Textures..." If Runtime were the default starting point, why include it? The default is apparently the Poser root folder. Is there method in the madness? The original Poser design pretty much limits faces, characters etc. to the one runtime folder--those are the things that show up in the library. Textures and presumably geometry could possibly be located elsewhere. So, in theory, you could have a Runtime_2:Textures... or Runtime_2:geometries... setup, within the Poser root and without going to absolute paths. Why, I have no idea except maybe to avoid overload in those to catch-all folders. I'm in the cotton headed phase of some winter illness so if none of this makes sense, I have an excuse :-)

"Democracy is a pathetic belief in the collective wisdom of individual ignorance." - H. L. Mencken

that does seem odd since it always has to be pointed to any textures outside of runtime always.

that does seem odd since it always has to be pointed to any textures outside of runtime always.

FWIW, it seems to work the same in P4. I created some different textures with the same name and placed one in Poser 4, one in Runtime and one in Textures. I created a MAT file that simply referenced :Mytexture (don't remember whether I included the leading colon or not). Using this MAT, the texture that got loaded was the one in the Poser 4 folder, not runtime or textures.

"Democracy is a pathetic belief in the collective wisdom of individual ignorance." - H. L. Mencken

Just wondering ... Did you close down Poser before doing the changes, or leave it running and swap to a different task? If the latter, Poser has cached the texture and will re-use it... Cheers, Diolma

That's true. If you tried to manually load the "new" texture with the same name, you'd get a warning that it was already loaded. Using a MAT, I'm not sure, It may just load the cached one without complaint.

"Democracy is a pathetic belief in the collective wisdom of individual ignorance." - H. L. Mencken