Okay, creating people is difficult; getting clothes to work properly with chairs and such is mostly impossible; so I'm going to take a crack at something that doesn't seem that hard but which I can find nothing about. I want to create my own clothing textures for various pieces of clothing. Most things come with templates, but the question is, what do you do with the templates and once you do something with the templates, how do you make it so that Poser 7 will acknowledge the files and allow you to change the look of the clothes? I know I need a PZ2 file, but how the HECK do you create one of those?

Well you don't necessarily need a PZ2 as your using Poser 7, you can save it as a material or a material collection.

Take the template into a program such as Photoshop or Paint Shop Pro, a graphics program that can handle layers is best. Create layers above your template and using the template as your guide, create your texture. Once you're finished you can flatten the layers (discarding the template) and save in a format readable by Poser -- jpg, png, even psd.

In the material room,  manually apply the texture to your clothing, then click the plus button and add as a material or it the clothing has many parts and you're using many texture files, a material collection. The pop up dialog will ask you to select one or the other.

Hmm...actually sounds...simple. Thanks!

Okay, I have the texture created and saved as a JPG file. Now...how do I find it in Poser so that I can use it?

It's in the manual.

A texture can be loaded in an image_map node in the Material room. Connect the image_map node to the Diffuse color input of the root node (the large block on the left side), and you're done.

I'd suggest reading the manual. It's not written very well, but it is in there.

Yeah...the manual that tells absolutely nothing about what you want to know about. I've read it...many times...and I've walked away with a splitting headache and no useful information. LOL. But, I did create a texture and got it loaded into Poser...except Poser won't render the image. Hmm...

Check your file size, if the file is really large then Poser can bog down and take a much longer time to render, also make sure to click on the advanced tab, if you're using higher than I think PropPack to make sure that you don't have conflicting nodes selected. Also check transparency settings. There are some good texture tutorials here as well as at Daz3d that can help you with creating textures. There is also Mat Pose Edit that I think is still freeware to help with the Mat Pose file for the new texture.. http://koti.mbnet.fi/~ilaripih/MPEHome/

-DR

go to materials room.  With the eyedropper select the item you are trying to apply the texture to.  Now in the first little box there "Diffuse color" double click the box.  Comes up with a browser window so you can navigate to the file you created.  Select your file, and accept accept.  

You should now see the new material applied to the figure. This is the absolute simplest way I have found to get it in there.  You should really go into the advanced tab and click around see how stuff matches up and learn to work from there as well.

Hope this helps.

Well, I can see the texture on my figure in the posing screen, but when I go to render, the texture isn't there. I can't seem to figure out how to solve the problem, either. I used the template for the figure in Photoshop, saved as a JPG file, and all of that worked. I just can't seem to get Poser to acknowledge the texture when it renders.

I've had that happen before -

The only solution I could come up with was to re-load the scene.

But is it coming up as white?  Or just the same as it was before?  Check in the advanced tab and make sure no other texture files are loaded for other nodes.

Yay! I figured it out! I was putting the picture in one box but not the second box. I put it in the second box, and it worked like a charm! Thanks, everyone, for your help!

Okay, now that I know how to make textures, how do I make it so I can just double click in the library to add the texture instead of having to go through the material room every time? LOL.

Quote - Okay, now that I know how to make textures, how do I make it so I can just double click in the library to add the texture instead of having to go through the material room every time? LOL.

http://koti.mbnet.fi/~ilaripih/MPEHome/ 

You need Mat Pose Edit. It's a free program. It only works on PC's though.

Oh, well. I own a wonderful, extremely powerful, frickin' awesome iMac, so I guess I'll just keep using the Materials Room and go through a few extra steps. But at least it works! I'm so happy!

Ha HA. Us Mac users used to have to do things manually. Now there are a few other options. I still find it simplest to save the entire figure to the library, open that file in a text editor, strip out everything but the materials and change the extension to pz2 A new option is to save all the materials to the materials library within Poser -- as a single material or as the new material set. A wrinkle to the above; save material set, leave poser, change the extension of the set and move it to another folder....and you've got a normal MAT pose again. But this is why "Use this program and press this button" is not always all-purpose advice. Sometimes it helps to know what is inside a MAT-pose and how to make one from scratch (as it were).

You can also take the original pose file for the figure you made the texture for and open it in a text editor, I use PFE, I don't know if it works on Mac or not, but a good text editor, not note pad :P 

Change the references to the original pose files textures to where your textures are located and save it as Mat Blue Dress.pz2 or whatever name that describes the texuture for the figure.

-DR