Page Three - Mat Files 101

Now it doesn't matter where you have saved all of this stuff, but when you use Mat Pose Edit, it definitely does!

Alright, I have now copied my dress obj file into Poser 6/runtime/Geometries/Irene/LittleLinenDress.obj and I have copied my two dress files into Poser 6/runtime/Libraries/Character/Irene/LittleLinenDress.cr2 and LittleLinenDress.png as well as LittleLinenDress2.cr2 and LittleLinenDress2.png....now I could have avoided all this work if I had begun my work there but I never do seem to learn.....and well, this IS A learning tutorial so it is full of all my failings. One more thing to do and that is move the two textures that were created for the dresses to Poser 6/runtime/Textures/Irene/littlelinendress.jpg and littlelinendress2.jpg.

NOW we can open Mat Pose Edit 3 and click on File/Open/Character File

Click on Character File and now you have to browse to Program Files/CuriousLabs/Poser6/Runtime/Libraries/Character/Irene/and look for the first dress texture which is LittleLinenDress.cr2 and select it and you now see the preview.

Click Open and there you have your first texture. MPE3 will ask if you want to load morph and pose data also - say NO and everything loads.

Since our texture is for all the groups within the dress, you could click on each one and it will have the same texture. We won't fool around with any of the other settings today but you could have a bump or a reflection map or even a transparency, which would also load into MPE3 from Poser if there were any of these.

The important thing now is to save this so we click on File and select Save As - which will open up your Pose folder...and then I just selected Irene and typed in MAT LittleLinenDress and pressed Save, which saved our first mat file.

I did the same thing for the second dress and saved it as MAT LittleLinenDress2 and pressed Save.

I've created one more dress texture so that we can have 3 textures for the dress all together in our package. This is actually a material from Elsina's gorgeous packages. And this is another VERY IMPORTANT TIP ~ create information as you go as to what products you are using so you can credit the Vendor in your readme file if this is going to be a product you either give away or sell!!!! I'll now have to go back and find the correct package so I can do that. The texture for the dress (not the belt part) is from Elsina's Girlz package...thank you very much Elsina, for all your gorgeous materials!

I've created this 3rd texture and saved it directly to runtime/textures/Irene/linendress3.jpg

So we need to add this to our Character library - open Poser, bring in the dress, go to Materials and add the 2d image as we did for the first one and save your created figure in your Figures/Character Library as LittleLinenDress3.jpg. NAMES are important as you will find out in a minute or two so be consistent and remember the correct names.

So now we have our three Character files, named LittleLinenDress1, LittleLinenDress2 and LittleLinenDress3.

Now, we need to open up Mat Pose Edit 3 again and create this pose file just as we did for the other two above. Now, the reason it is important to have the same name when you create the Mat Pose File is because the program does not create your little pngs so when you open up Poser and look in your Pose library under Irene, you will see the shrugging guy for each of the 3 new pose files above.

Not to worry! All you need to do now is to copy your three pngs from your Character/Irene library and Paste them into your Pose/Irene library and that is why they have to HAVE THE SAME NAME; otherwise you will have to create new ones. Hopefully you know how to copy and paste in Windows Explorer or whatever program you use.

Continue to Page Four