Someone on the forums said you copuld do 3D modelling in Poser so, guided by Dr Geep, I've built a 15th century Pele tower, a fortified tower house common in Scotland and the English Border Counties where I live. I only want an external model, it looks nice and I wouldn't mind uploading it somehow if I can texture and finish it, put something back for all the freebies and help I've had.

Advice and opinion please - shall I join all 40-odd bits into  a single prop, or shall I make it a figure with parts? (but how, it doesn't have bones, nothing moves) If it is a prop will it be a nightmare to texture? Is there a way to texture each bit - is that what Dr Geep means by Assign Materials in the Grouping window?

I'd show you but the site won't allow me to put an image here and  wipes my text if I try (whine and gripe for another thread when I have time)

no bones nor movement - save as prop. yes, "assign materials" will be time-consuming, but easy to do. they'll let ya post an image here, provided it's 200 KB or smaller.

For each part that needs diffrent materials you need to assign it to a diffrent group, then assign a material to that group. Descriptive names will make it easier to change materials later, if you want you can use the same name for group and material, eg group name "TowerRoof" material name "TowerRoof", or you can have one material "tiles" and apply it to the groupes "LeftTowerRoof" and "RightTowerRoof".

Once you have the groupes and materials sorted out, apply the colours, textures, and any other material settings. Now export all the parts to one Wavefront OBJ file, ticking only "Include existing groups..." in the export options. Now open a new Poser document and import the OBJ you saved, leaving all the import options un-ticked (or you may want to use "Centered" and "Place on floor" if you have not already aligned the prop). Now save the prop to a props pallet.

Open the pp2 you saved in a text editor, search the string "Map" (case sensitive). Make sure Poser has saved the paths to any texture or other maps as a relitive path, colon seperated, and enclosed in double quote marks, these forms are ok:

":SomeFolder:wall.jpg"
or
":Runtime:Textures:SomeFolder:wall.jpg"

An absolute path, or one using back slashes, or without quote marks should not be used. If it has any of those you should edit it to one of the above forms.

You can now package the PP2 in a zip for distribution. Include any texture or other map files. You do not need an OBJ file as with this method the geomertry is stored internally in the pp2.

Sorry, this is not working. 

I have made all the 60+ building blocks into relevant parts (props?), exported-imported and deleted the old parts. So I now have a little castle with 17 properly named parts.

The Grouping Tool will not recognise these new parts.

It will not accept that I have joined the building shell and windows into one part called Tower and DELETED the shell and the windows. 'Tower' will not appear in the space at the top of the GT window, only the name 'Box6poly_1' , the shell, which no longers exists. Click on the little black triangle and all the other deleted names of the windows appear. 
Try to get any other of the new parts into the GT and the list has names that I've never even seen- I'm looking at 'p7_2', nothing I've EVER done in Poser in the last two years has had that name.

What is going on???  How do I assign a material or anything else to my Tower?? 
If I finally get somewhere is it going to say at the end Oh you should have UVMapped everything at the start???

Can someone please explain?

What you need to do now in the grouping window is click the "Create New Group" button then start selecting all the surfaces for that group. Once you have the surfaces selected for, let's say, the roof. You then assign them a new material name by clicking assign material button and typing in a new material name for that group. It would have been much easier if you had done this before exporting the single props and reimporting as one grouped prop. If you have any backups of the single props I'd suggest you assign the materials to them before you export as a single prop. They will retain their grouping assignments and material names if you export as OBJ.

Among my many duties I've been an IT Coordinator since 1984, so I've heard the weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth far too many times - got FIVE generations of backups for this!! 

So, I've done your instructions in the GT for the roof, (only 2 polygons) and sure enough on the Material room menu I have Preview and now Roof Slates, click on that and go through the New Node>etc procedure, browse to a slate-ish texture and sure enough it appears on the roof. If I export and import it, it comes back with the same texture on it.
But then I did the same thing with another of the backups without bothering with the Grouping tool at all and got exactly the same result. 

So why am I going through the Grouping procedure? Can I not just UVmap a simple object, cut and paste the texture till it fits the UV template and then apply it? Does UVMapping, by telling you where the polygons are, allow you to do the same as the GT? Is it only with complex structures like people that you need to use the GT? Someone please comfirm that I'm not missing something here.

Thank you all for your comments, it has certainly been an interesting day so far (I nearly died when I saw the Renderosity Home page this morning!!!)

Colin_S(mith), definitely not any sort of guru

I think you ought to have a look at UVmapper Classic. Also, consider Wings 3D as a tool. I've found Wings 3D to be quite useful for selecting polygons and assigning them to materials--for a start, things are easier to see than in Poser. One of the hassles with using the in-Poser grouping tool is that you have to assign the polygons to a new group, assign a material to that group, and remember to delete that group. Apart from the obvious side of sorting out UV maps, UVmapper is also handy for combining materials. Sometimes, it's easir to UVmap an object with parts as different materials, and then combine them to a single material/texturemap. I've done that with a set of pants, flattening out the cloth and arranging the segments in a way resembling a tailor's cutting pattern. And the final single piece of cloth is an obvious single material, with stripes affected by seams just like the real thing.

Colin, Yeah you can do the exact same thing with UVMapper or by simply assigning the material to the parts in the material room before exporting, but I think you'll find the Poser grouping tool very handy down the road if you learn to use it now. I use it quite often on imported 3DS and OBJ files to break them down to their componant parts for Poserising. The only thing about assigning each separate part a material in the material room is you're stuck wit the material name they came with. If you want descriptive material names, you're better off assigning the material name through the grouping tool. IE: RoofTiles, Walls, Floors etcetra instead of cube 1, cube 2 yada yada yada....

Yes I've got UVMapper, got no problem with using it. Got Wings3d too, but don't use it as I don't really care for subdivision modelling, prefer building up polygons and primitives and welding them together.

I have made the textures on the UV template, have even got them to appear in the right place on the various parts of the house. 'Pele tower007 .pz3' looks very nice.

But when I export all the parts to put them together as a single prop and then import that back into Poser there is an indescribable mess of textures. 
Only 3 of 15 parts appear to have textured correctly and only 2 material names appear in the dropdown list in the Materials room with image nodes to textures I have assigned to parts of the prop. 
Why has Poser applied the textures correctly in the .pz3 file, but failed utterly when asked to apply the same textures to the same places in a .pp2 file?

What is the failure this time?

Got it all to work via the Grouping tool, don't ask how, I think I named everything differently the same four times then deleted it all three times. Confused? Yes I am, but it works,  and I've got the .pp2, .png and the texture .jpegs all neatly in a Zip.

But to upload it, where shall I put it ? (before 10,000 of you reach for the keyboard, don't even think about it !!)
The Renderosity Upload page asks for a URL, but I don't have a webpage so to the best of my knowledge I don't have a URL.
Rapidshare seems to get nothing but complaints and insults, is there another and better place for uploads ?

Speaking solely as a downloader, www.sharecg.com looks pretty good, though whether it will last I'm not sure. It's advertising-funded--not intrusive but is there anough money in that?