Creating a MAT Pose File (.pz2)

For a Figure Texture

Table of Contents

1. Creating a Material File. 2

2. Changing the Material file into a PZ2 pose file. 6

1. Creating a Material File

After you''ve created your texture and have a jpg file, you need to make a MAT pose file for easy appliance. This is a very easy process using primarily Poser, with minor use of Mat Pose Edit and notepad (or any text editor).

Remember for clean folders, it''s always a good idea to put your textures that you made into a folder. A good rule if you wish to distribute them is to mark for ease of finding later. Example. LD\Sadie – LD is the username (creator), Sadie is the character the textures are for.

We will create a mat pose file for a swimsuit texture for Sadie. The same rules apply for anything found in the figure folder, be it an actual character (V4, A3…), clothing, or anything else.

1. Load your figure in Poser, in this case, Sadie''s swimsuit, then select the Material Tab to go to the Material Room.

1. Now we want to select our new texture to apply to the swimsuit. Click on the area where the current texture is. A new smaller window will open.

A.    Click on the Browse button and find your desired texture in the appropriate folder.

B.     Select the texture, click OPEN.

C.     The texture will be displayed in the small window, assuming it''s the one you want, then click OK.

Now you will see your texture applied to the clothing or a portion of the clothing if it is subdivided into parts.

1. This clothing only has 1 part – you can verify this by clicking on the top where it says Material      swimsuit. (see diagram below for *)

2. *

   If you had more than one material – you would apply for each one by selecting it from the list and then following step 2 until the entire figure had been assigned material zone textures.

1. If you were applying textures to an item that you want to alter via transparency maps, to make certain parts transparent or not visible. You would click where it says Transparency and follow the same steps as we did to apply the texture. Remember transparency maps are only in Black & White (or shades of grey).[See diagram above]
2. If you wish to apply texture, so that your material doesn''t appear ''flat'', again you follow the same rules as we did in step 2, to apply a bump map (usually done in grey). [See diagram above]
3. Now that we''ve applied our texture to the said figure, we need to save the materials into a usable file in Poser. In order to do this, click on the + sign in the Materials column on the far right.

1. A new window will open for saving the texture into a material file. Assign a Name for the Material, and make sure to select Material Collection.

1. If you assigning materials to all the zones, you do not need to click on the Select materials_ button. If you are assigning textures to only some of the zones (perfect example being character textures where you don''t want to assign to the eyes but just the skin zones) then you would click the Select Materials_ button. Doing so will bring up another window with the zones of the figure. Uncheck any that you do not want, and check any of the ones you do want, then click OK on both the open windows.
2. You will now find in that materials listing on the far right, a new material (per the name you gave). Now we will use this file outside of Poser. Normally I minimize Poser so that I can later check my work without having to reload everything.

2. Changing the Material file into a PZ2 pose file.

1. Now go through windows explorer/my computer and find your Poser directories. We want to open the folder Runtime/Libraries/Materials. If you right-click, you will get a pop-up menu, select  arrange icons by – Modified. This will put your most recent changes at the end of the folder. Scroll to the bottom and find your material collection that you created. You will have a .png file and a .mc6/mc5 file (depending on poser). Select them and copy (from the menu bar-Edit -Copy).

1. Now go to your Pose folder: (Runtime/Libraries/Pose) and paste the selected files into the appropriate subfolder. In this case I''m putting them into a folder called Sadie Swimsuit MATS. To paste – from the menu bar select Edit-Paste. You will now have a png & mc# file added to the folder.
2. Click on the .mc# file to highlight, and then right-click. A pop-up menu will appear. Choose Rename and change the extension of the file from .mc# to .pz2
3. Open the newly renamed file in notepad. To do this, right-click on the file and choose Open with… from the pop-up menu. If Notepad isn''t shown, select choose program. You can use any text editor, so use what is your preference. Do not use MS Word. When you open the file it will look something like the figure below.

1. You need to change the word mtlCollection that comes after …number #} in the beginning of the file to say figure. Just highlight it and type over it. Then save the edited file. You can also change the version number at this point if you wish, to 4 so that all poser versions 4 and above will be able to open the file without getting errors.
2. At this point your pz2 file is usable. I like to make it easy to read as well, so I open the file in MAT Pose Edit and click save to adjust the line formatting only. Note: You do not need to do this. It only makes it easier to look at and edit later if you wish to.

Added Note: If you have done several textures for a piece and wish to make the pz2 files quickly. Create the first pz2 file as we have done here. For the remainder, copy this file and rename it. Then edit it with your text editor and do a find/replace to change the name of the texture file (the .jpg that you can see referenced in the diagram above at the end of the 4^th line.)

7. Now try your Pz2 file if you wish by going into Poser and applying it to the figure. Remember if it''s clothing, some clothing needs to be conformed to the figure first for Mats to be rendered correctly.