I know there's a couple of us building props and costumes for the Poser crowd within our beloved Carrara. Some of us have been doing this since Ray Nightmare! Anyone have any comments, tips, et al to share on this process? I'll start the ball rolling on my experiences with textures so far... I've been building entirely within Vertex Modeller, naming selections of polygons to make object groups. I've found that if I assign Shading Domains from within the Vertex Modeller, and also create a multi-channel shader for each domain in the layers list, I can export an .obj file with the proper usemtl statements. Unfortunately, the domain names I saw in Carrara vanish, leaving me to do a find-and-replace with BBedit of a list of "usemtl Default_1," "usemtl Default_2." And, of course, there is the usual reversed-normals dance. I had some luck stripping normals via UVmapper, but the only real solution I've had is to empty all polygons, detach the vertices, do a weld at a fairly small value to catch any stray vertices, triangulate to catch any loose n-gons, then re-fill. And sometimes I STILL have to invert a few faces.

I haven't gotten into it much myself yet. But There is a poser/carrara plug-in announced (but not out yet) tht should make it all easier.. maybe just wait?

Those material and group name glitches are a big pain in the butt, I agree. You have to hunt down every instance of a group name and make sure it's right in Poser after import. You already know about the problem with illegal characters, like spaces, in material names. What it boils down to is renaming everything in Poser, spawning props, deleting the original obj file, re-assigning material names, then exporting the obj file exactly the way Poser likes it. At that point, the phi file you create is now very likely to work the first time.

That's one of the glitches I've noticed in Carrara. I create a vertex obj and name it something, but it's still called "Vertex Object" in the assembly room. It seems like Carrara also "forgets" material names the same way.

Hmm. I have a rather different approach that seems to work for me. The heart of it is BBedit, and editing the "g" and "usemtl" statements by hand. I use UVmapper frequently for a quick-and-dirty visual check, and there are two distinct Poser stages; one where I just pop the mesh in to look for reversed normals, and a later step where I actually size it properly then export from Poser in this new scale. I noticed with my last prop that Carrara didn't bother to create a "Default_1" material unless there was actually data in that layer...a color assigned or something. So I think I'm going back to my old scheme of naming all the groups -- "hip_skin, hip_cyber, hip_LED" -- and changing most of those groups into usemtl's in BBedit. I do need to try the Spawn Props-Create New Figure approach some time. It's a lot of extra work to edit down the cr2 from a humanoid to fit the groups on a Smith&Wesson.