How do I get rid of unused Material channels in a character file. I reduced the number of materials in the mesh but they still show in the char file. Is there a trick to erase them from it?

You can edit them out using one of the various Poser file editors like John Stallings CR2Editor. You can actually delete them all including "default" and "Preview" then when you next load the figure, Poser adds in only the materials it sees in the OBJ.

Open it up in gvim (www.gvim.org) or another text editor and search for 'material' and delete each material block. If you're using gvim, you can delete an entire curly-bace delimited block by positioning the cursor on the { and pressing v, then % -- it will jump to the matching closing } and it's smart enough to know to skip inner nested blocks -- then delete with delete, d or x. Though, PhilC, I beg to differ on one thing -- you can certainly remove 'default' (and you won't even have it if you have materials assigned to every face in the mesh) but 'Preview' is there to stay -- it's used to determine the colour of the blocks in fast tracking. It will come back no matter how often you remove it - and it should, as otherwise you'd have to use full tracking to preview an animation, and usually that means you'd see the first and last frame only if your machine is like mine. Of course, I don't know about Poser 5.

Yes, I see how I've written ambiguously and you are right, Poser will also put the preview material back in automatically. When I need to strip out materials from a CR2 I always delete the Preview because there have been occasions when it has included references to redundant textures. In this way I know that the new Preview will be "clean".

Gotcha. Yep, I always pull it out, too. It's kinda silly that it is actually treated as a material, I think. I'd have simply coded in an 'preview color' selector right next to the figure or object name dialog and make a different default material for un-matted faces, but I didn't (and couldn't yet) code Poser. Even writing an OBJect parser module for Perl has been hurting my head.