Poser's user interface has no problem allowing you to create and assign materials in the Materials room, but there seems to be no option whatsoever to delete materials. I've tried the search engines for tips, but I've been unable to turn up anything.

How do you delete materials from a figure in Poser?

Suppose I wanted to delete the material "SkinTorso" from a figure. How would I do that?

I'm afraid you can't delete material zones in Poser. That requires a modeling program or at the very least, a text editor.

Laurie

Click to enlarge : All figures above have only 3 material zones; -Body -Lashes -Cornea

Material zones are in 2 places: In the obj file and in the cr2.

Best way I can think of is to: (and that is the way I use amost every day)
Open the obj file in uvmapper free.
Select the material you want to merge with another material zone.
Click "assign to" and click the materail you want to merge with.

Save that obj file (preferrably to a new name)

That way you can merge multiple material zones into fewer material zones.

Then open the cr2 file, let it point to the new obj file (2 places) and delete the material zones that are no longer required.

Most of my figures have extremely few mat zones.

• Body, that includes ALL
• Lashes => because lashes materials HAVE to load with GC set to 1.000
• Cornea => for transparancy, shine, and GC purposes

This of course only works this way with single diffuse map figures like Posette, the Poser Dev figures and a few others.

But you can merge as long as they stay on the same map.
For V4? You can not merge the torso with the head as they are on different diffuse maps.
You have to merge with something that is on the same diffuse map.

Happy Posering
Tony

The BIG and HUGE advantage is that when you want to change the skin tone, you only have to adapt ONE single Material making Material room work extremely simple.

There is no way that I know of to delete materials from within Poser. Unfortunately, the explanation of this gets a little long winded and complicated. The material zones themselves (groups of polygons assigned to a material) will be part of the geometry, and may be either internal (geomCustom) or external (obj) geometry. Most figures (cr2) and props (pp2) use an external obj file to house the geometry, and therefore the material zones are also in the obj.

When you use the Poser Grouping Tool to assign materials, Poser creates new internal (geomCustom) geometry. When you save a prop that has internal geometry to the Props library, it will continue to use the internal geometry the next time it is loaded. With a figure that uses internal geometry, it's a different story. When you save a figure that has internal geometry to the Figures library, Poser will write a new obj file for the figure, and immediately start using that new obj. You don't need to reload the figure, a figure "in play" will start using the new obj immediately. The new obj file will have the same name as the figure you saved, and it will be placed in the same folder as the cr2 you saved.

In the geometry the material zones define which polygons are assigned to which materials. This is done in the sections of the file starting with 'usemtl' lines.

In addition to the material zones in the geometry, a pp2 or cr2 will also contain 'material' sections, these 'material' sections define the settings for the particular material, eg colour, image maps, etc, that will be applied to a zone.

OK, so how do you remove materials? To remove a material zones from an obj file, I usually use 'UV Mapper', the free version will do fine for this. First make sure you have a backup of the obj file, in case things go wrong. Load the obj into UV Mapper, select the material you want to remove;

Edit > Select > by Material

Once you have selected the material, assign the selection to a different material;

Edit > Assign > to Material

You can assign the selection to one of the existing materials, or type in a name to change the name of the material. When you have assigned the facets to the desired material zones save the obj. The old material will now have been removed from the obj. You can also do the above in most modelling applications, though of course the details will vary with the application.

You have now removed the material zone[s] from the geometry, but you still need to remove the relevant 'material' section[s] from the pp2 or cr2. This is best done in an application designed specifically to edit Poser files, you can use the free CR2Editor by John Stallings, or Poser File Editor from Dimension 3D,  or PhilC's pz3edit. In a pinch it can be done in a text editor, but I don't recommend that as it involves a lot of scrolling.

Notepad++ or Crimson Editor are good editors if you desire to use one. They have excellent, Find, Find/Replace features ;). Notepad++ lays it out correctly as well, unlike Windows Notepad which makes a mess of any Poser file.

Laurie

How about when you accidentally add a load of materials to something.. when you load a MT6 file for the wrong object in the scene (it pops up telling you that this includes material zones not present and do you ewant to create them.. ish... can't remember the exact wording)

Does that actually overwrite something in the obj too? It's just as annoying but I've never noticed the problem persist on a reload. (Although I may just not have looked for it)

I am unclear on your meaning (the original post) . You can clear a material mostly by right click and select all nodes, then select delete. Another  way is to load a simple material and then select the script (macro) to delte unused nodes.

 

Deleteing a material zone can be done in the group editor or by using a text editor in the obj file. the usemtl lines are the definitions. You need to assign those to another material though, just deleting them will be a mess.

Thanks for the help, everyone. It cleared up some misunderstandings I previously had. However, I seem to have run into a new problem in the process.

I created a geometry in 3DS Max and imported it to Poser to just fine. I loaded the Setup room, and then I applied the Michael 3.0 skeleton base, as well as its groups. What I have now is a figure with the SkinTorso, SkinHead and all other material zones from Michael 3.0. When I load my .obj in UVMapper like you all suggested, the SkinTorso, SkinHead and other Michael 3.0 specific material zones do not appear.

I am trying to get rid of the useless material zones while retaining the same skeleton of the figure I intend to conform the geometry to.

Darchind, your last post added information missing from the original post. In your original post, you talked about creating materials in Poser, so I assumed that is what you had done, and that it was a material zone created in Poser that you needed to get rid of. Now it's clear that the materials you don't want came from the M3 cr2. These are not material zones, just material definitions (material settings), and they only exist in the cr2, and thus you only need to edit the cr2 to get rid of them.

Get CR2Editor (or one of the other editors mentioned in my last post). In CR2Editor (for example),  load the cr2, and scroll down until you see the 'figure' section (near the bottom of the file), and expand that section by clicking the + sign next to it. Scroll down again until you see the lines starting with the word 'material'. Click on a 'material' that you want to delete, then press the keyboard Delete key. Do the same for other materials you want to delete. Save the cr2 back to disk. The process is similar in other editors, in some editors you can select and delete multiple materials in one go, but CR2Editor only allows you to select one at a time.

If you were to delete all the materials from the cr2, the next time you loaded the figure, Poser would read the material zones from the obj file and add corresponding material definitions to the figure. You would need to save the figure again for these to become a permanent part of the cr2.

Assuming that your obj file is your own creation, and not just a morph of the m3 obj, you will probably also want to delete any morphs from the figure. Morphs are stored in the individual actors as 'targetGeom' sections and can be deleted in the same way as the materials. Also any 'valueParm' (FBM) channels in the BODY actor can be deleted in the same way.  

CR2Editor can only open cr2 files, it can't open crz files. If your figure is saved as a crz, open it in Poser, then in Edit menu > General Preferences > Misc tab, deselect 'Use file compression', then resave the figure to create a cr2.

@TrekkieGrrrl,

No, adding materials via a pz2, mc6, or mt5, will not affect the obj file.

Thank you very much. I appreciate it.

For anyone else following this thread, CR2Editor can be downloaded here:

http://www.morphography.uk.vu/dlutility.html