I use the morph tool to alter a character, get it just right.

But when I re-open the scene the morph value appears on the dial but not on the character, and spinning the dial now does nothing.

I suspect it's a "use external binary morph" issue. Resaving the scene with the option off doesn't bring the morph back and make it usable. I guess it's gone forever. Is there any point to using the external binary morph oprion apart from file size?

Does the scene file have a separate .pmd file?

Yes. A .pmd is generated for each saved .pz3, and other injection morphs (morph++) are still there and working. Only the morph brush ones are affected. They have dissapeared from all the characters in the scenes I've saved, and the custom morph dial for them no longer does anything.

I'll play around a bit more with different options to see what happens.

This message popped up just now, which I haven't seen before.

I think I just need to leave the damn thing OFF all the time or ON all the time.

I agree.

I used to have external binary morphs set to on in my preferences and just recently switched to having them off, one less file to worry about. Haven't noticed any problems yet and my older scene files seem to load with morph data intact, including custom morphs. A lot of times I back up my morphs with .obj files which I can use as morph targets.

I had always heard that SM had ironed out the .pmd bugs after poser 7...