Software used
Poser
A text editor of your choice
gzip (optional)

Overview
There are various utilities and tutorials for the creation of MAT pose files for Poser.  They tend to make what should me a simple procedure seem much more complex than it needs to be.  As a result, I developed this simple method, this tutorial will be present that method.  A MAT pose is nothing more than the material section of a Poser character/figure CR2 file stored within a minimal pose PZ2 file.

Preparing your tool kit
You will need one or more minimal pose files, depending on which versions of Poser your MAT files will support. For MAT poses that support Poser 4 or latter use this:

Quote:

{
version
[tab]{
[tab]number 4.01
[tab]}
figure
[tab]{
[tab]}
}

For MAT poses that support the features of Poser 5 and if they don't look good with Poser 4, replace the "4.01" with "5".  For the same situation with Poser 6 replace the "4.01" with "6".  Save the file with any name you want, for this tutorial name it "minimal.pz2".

Preparation
Load your character, apply and fine tune its textures.  Save the character in the character library.  Save the character in the pose library.

Extracting The material Blocks
In your text editor, load the character's CR2 file.  Locate the first line of the materials section. The line looks like this:"material skin". The word "skin" may be a different word, that does not matter.  What does matter is that it is the first line that begins with the "material".  Delete everything that proceeds that line.  Now go the the end of the file and locate the line that looks like this: "displayMode USEPARENT".  Once again the second word may be different and the important word to look for is "displayMode".  Delete that line and all the lines following it.  What you are left with is your material settings (texture) for your character.  Save your material blocks in a temporary file or copy it all to the clip boards, depending on how your text editor works.

Building the MAT Pose File
You will now Insert the material blocks that you have just extracted from the CR2 file into a copy of your minimal pose file.  Load "minimal.pz2" into your text editor locate the cursor between the opening and closing pair of braces following the word "figure".  Paste the material blocks from the clipboard or read in the temporary file, again depending on the way that you text editor works.  Save the file with the same name as the Pose that you added to the library, with a pz2 extension.  Now copy the file in place of the pose that you save in the pose library.  And you are ready to test or use your MAT pose.

Detail
Starting with Poser 4 PP, Poser can save the library files either as compressed or uncompressed text file.  The procedures presented here assumed that the files you are working with are not compressed.  A CR2 and PZ2 files are not compressed.  The compressed versions them are CRZ and P2Z files.  If Poser is compressing your files when saving them or adding them to the library, you will need to turn off that feature prior to adding the figure and pose to the library, so that your text editor can read them.  If that is not an option, uncompressing them is easy there are a few Poser utilities and PoserPythons scripts that can do that for you.  Since compressed Poser files are not an exotic format, they are nothing more than the regular files such as CR2 that have been compressed using the standard gzip format.  So you can use the GNU gzip program or some other program that can uncompress such files.

Samples
Below are a few sample images that I rendered with a MAT pose that created while preparing this tutorial.  No postwork was applied and the renders were done with non-chromatic three point lighting. Top row, left to right: the stock Posette model with her default texture, Yamato's Linlin character with he default texture, my Betty character with her default texture that I created by enhancing the standard Posette texture.  Bottom row, left to right: Posette with Betty's texture applied as a Poser 4 MAT pose, Yamatos's Linlin with Betty's texture also applied as a Poser 5 MAT pose, my Regina character with her new base texture (still a WIP) that I painted from scratch.  Why is Regina here?  I had an empty space in the grid, and she didn't want to be left out.


Now, let's make art and help beautify the world.

Pangor
© 2005

Thanks so much Pangor I think I just might be able to accomplish that!  

Many thanks for taking the time to do this. It's very much appreciated.

Now I need to practice....  

____________
Computer Lie #1: You'll never use all that disk space.

"I love deadlines. I like the whooshing sound as they fly by." - Douglas Adams

You are welcome.

Pangor

Yes, thank you pangor. I'll do some exercises in the weekend ! (an take 0 at school monday   )

____________

Welcome.

Pangor

I have edited this tutorial to correct a typo that was brought to my attention.  In the process I found a few more and have corrected them also. Some were poor grammer while others were a little more confusing, sorry.

Pangor

No problem pangor   !! Thank you again for your tut !

____________

Thanks for the tut Pangor!

____________
Here we go!

Welcome



Pangor

I just used it, thank you Pangor

____________