I thought this would be obvious, but it seems it isn't.

I wanted to experiment with adjusting certain textures, so I drilled down into the Textures directory to whatever jpeg the material or pose file pointed to and edited that in Photoshop. When I reapplied the texture it was the same as before the edits. I thought it might be a caching issue, but I flushed everything and even rebooted. Still no change.

OK. So I renamed the Textrures directory to XTextures thinking that would do something dramatic, but it still came up with the original texture. I was amazed. I tried opening other objects and applying textures and sometimes I would get the window asking me to find the particular jpeg, but sometimes it seemed to be able to locate it even in the renamed directory.

I am stumped.

Are you sure about that?  Quite often the preview will appear to be unchanged but a render will show the differences.  Reverting to preview after a render will usually show the changed version, too.

It depends on the File Search setting in General Preferences

If it is set to None, it will only look at the specified location, the folder the object is coming from and the textures root folder (or geometries root folder for obj files). It will do this in all attached runtimes.

If it is set to Shallow, it will make educated guesses and parse the path to correct mistakes and try it in all variations in all runtimes. It will also look in locations where previous textures were found.

If it is set to Deep, it will search the entire textures folder and take the first one it encounters with the correct filename

Be aware that the texture name has to be unique in a Poser session. So loading different textures with the same filename will not work

Use the reload textures option.

use a unique name for changes.

learn to save mc6 file (material collections)

Quote - I thought this would be obvious, but it seems it isn't.

I wanted to experiment with adjusting certain textures, so I drilled down into the Textures directory to whatever jpeg the material or pose file pointed to and edited that in Photoshop. When I reapplied the texture it was the same as before the edits. I thought it might be a caching issue, but I flushed everything and even rebooted. Still no change.

OK. So I renamed the Textrures directory to XTextures thinking that would do something dramatic, but it still came up with the original texture. I was amazed. I tried opening other objects and applying textures and sometimes I would get the window asking me to find the particular jpeg, but sometimes it seemed to be able to locate it even in the renamed directory.

I am stumped.

I use poser 8 with the file search set to "None" in the general preferences. This is what poser seems to do:

If a prop contains an absolute pathname, like 'file "C:posertexturesimage.png"', it uses this. This is usually the case when i create an image-map myself and save it.

Another common case applies when the file contains a texture reference with a library-path like 'file ":Runtime:Textures:image.png"'. In this case, poser will look through all the Runtime-folders in the order in which they appear in your LibraryPrefs.xml in turn, and use the first matching file it finds. The order of the Runtime folders in the LibraryPrefs is relevant, the Folder that contains the prop that references the texture is not. So, if i have the two runtime-folders C:A and C:B and C:BRuntimeLibrariesPropsB.pp2 uses the texture ":Runtime:Textures:B.png", it will use "C:ARuntimeTexturesB.png" if it exists, it will not check for "C:BRuntimeTexturesB.png". So i have to be careful when i make a copy of a prop (in order to modify it) and copy it into another runtime-folder (perhaps this is what you did?). It usually does not what i want unless i reassign the texture and save it again (in which case poser writes an absolute pathname "C:BRuntimeTexturesB.png" into it). Most commercial objects for poser contain texture references like this.

The remark of wimvdb, that you can have only one texture with any given filename at any given time, however, still applies.

If the filesearch is set to "deep", i am under the impression that poser searches for the texture on my whole harddrive (not just the textures folder) for any texture used. I have no idea what "shallow" does or what other poser-versions do.

Thanks, millighost. My first reaction to your post was, "That cannot possibly be right!" but apparently it is. This is from the Poser Manual:

• File Search: When an object is loaded from the Library, Poser searches for all the associated files included with that object. The File Search options allow you to configure the extent of that search. These options are:

• None..: Selecting None disables file searching; this option is useful for testing the accuracy of newly developed content.

• Shallow.: Selecting Shallow will reduce the amount of time spent searching for missing or mislabeled files, but will increase the instances of files not found.

• Deep.: This is the default File Search setting. We recommend that you select Deep file searching, as this option initiates the most extensive searches for content file components, hence increasing the likelihood that missing or mislabeled files will be found.

That doesn't really tell you much, but my tests pretty well confirm what you said, and I have to say - What a terrible, terrible idea. What were the developers thinking? Good lord, no wonder Poser is so slow. You have to wonder how many other bone-headed, inefficient, useless "features" are built into the code. Forgive me for ranting but ~!@#$%^&*()+!!!!

Even when I set "File Search" to "None" it still seems to go looking for the file outside of what is stated in the referring object.

Also, I'm not sure what you are saying with, "Most commercial objects for poser contain texture references like this.", e.g., "C:BRuntimeTexturesB.png". All the references I've seen are in the form of:

":Runtime:Textures:::"

None have the device name , e.g., "C:" appended.

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Quote - ... Also, I'm not sure what you are saying with, "Most commercial objects for poser contain texture references like this.", e.g., "C:BRuntimeTexturesB.png". All the references I've seen are in the form of:

":Runtime:Textures:::"

None have the device name , e.g., "C:" appended.

Er, yes that is what i meant, "this method" referred to the start of the paragraph, but i got to much slipslop in between :-)

You could use freebies from here to sharecg to very easily get a full set of all 26, non-existing drive letters in your poser-files :-)