heyas; okay, i confess i haven't really been paying attention to the nifty poser utilities and all that people have been working on. so feel free to thwap me if i should know this... has anybody parsed the poser cds and created an alternate installer that lets you selectively install stuff? you know, when you ONLY need to restore ONE little obj and you dont want to install every blessed little thing just to get it? i dunno, i haven't looked at it... does it use cabs or what? i've decided to create my own do-it-yourself alternative. since i got my big new drive, i was able to do a parellel poser install. then i went and put everything in zip files that i'm going to burn to cd. all the animals in one zip, all the biz people in another, all the robots in one... kidz in another... poses... lights... plugins and the prog files. dunno, might be a good idea to think about. so if you NEVER work with animals and delete them all, but suddenly find you desperately need the bllion.obj to decode rena's lion-head brooch, or doc legume inspires you to create something with the poser 1 figures you trashed long ago, or you ditched the robots only to find somebody made a really hella cool gargoyle with the legs of one.... you could just unzip the suckers. for obvious reasons, a cd of this sort can't be distributed. but you can make your own.

That would be neat, some of the stuff (low quality bussiness woman, old characters) I could delete and easily restore if I need them for massive scene background.

Unfortunately, the cab files are locked, at least on the MetaCremations CD. CR2Edit has a remove/backup tool, removes/backsup all files associated with the file open in CR2Edit. This is only good for one set at a time, and is not a substitute for zipping and storing entire groups on CD, but is handy when you are about to make drastic changes to a file that you haven't backed up and don't want to clutter up your library with alternate versions, or if you open something and decide it is utter garbage and want to dump the whole thing. Dan http://www.zenwareonline.com/cr2edit/cr2edit.html Sorry Win only for software http://www.zenwareonline.com for ZenPaint, ZenTile, ZenGrid and VueMaster

Mac OS has a utility called Tome-Viewer that is used to read installation CDs and extract desired files. I don't know if it works on the Poser CD, which apparently has a security feature (mentioned by Dan) that may make extraction difficult. That must be a lock function that's distinct from the read-only nature of a finished CD, which is called "locking a disk" in Mac OS.

Yes Nyar, that is CabViewer on PC, and you are right, it isn't the read-only type of locking. There is a header file associated with each cab that probably contains the info needed to access the cab, someone with some time might look at them and see if there are any clues in them. I don't know why MetaCremations (and presumably CL) did this, it is worthless as security since all you would need to get at the files would be to install Poser, and it makes it a big hassel to restore blown files. Effectively forces us to make our own copy of them with zip files, not a big deal, but still... Dan http://www.zenwareonline.com/cr2edit/cr2edit.html Sorry Win only for software http://www.zenwareonline.com for ZenPaint, ZenTile, ZenGrid and VueMaster

I am ALWAYS reworking the cr2 files to put the geometries where I want 'em instead of where they have ended up (that includes all the poser animals that the install process spreads everywhere. I found a very nice editor called Edit Pad Lite is great for making multiple find and replaces on multiple files simultaneously. http://www.editpadlite.com/

I use that to Petunia, great littl program :o) Steve

heyas; well, maybe curious labs can put out a custom installer utility. if they have time. :/

I dunno if youve got the disk space to spare, but I just ZIPped the OBJ Folders in case I accidentally overwrite them. Doesnt take up too much space and easy accessible...