Some unpack correctly and you've now got Xena, Warrior Princess in your Poser window. But what about the others? Squatting on your hard drive now is a pile of odd files with extensions like "cr2" and "pz3." Where did they all come from? Where do they belong? Will they even work in Poser 3? And which one, oh which one, is the Dirk Benedict facial morph you so wanted?

The following is not a menu of "push button A, push button B" solutions; it is a look under Poser's hood. Once you understand what the program is trying to do, figuring out where to put these files is easy. And, much more interesting creative options become open to you as well.

"Don't Know Much About Geometry" You can't pose without a figure. Seem obvious? Even a simple hat needs something, somewhere, to tell poser what the shape is. That something is an object -- more properly, a file in Wavefront .obj format. Most of them are in a folder called "geometries," which are in another folder called "runtime," which needs to be in the same folder as Poser. Poser runs on vertices. So what in the world is a vertex? Well, here's an easy lab you can do yourself... Take a sheet of graph paper. Write out the numbers 1 through 10 on the left side and bottom of the sheet. Just like math class, right? Now at 3,3 put a dot. That dot, friend, is a "vertex." Put another at 3,7 and at 6,5 another. Connect the dots. Not just any dots, mind you. 3,3 to 3,7 and 3,7 to 6,5 and 6,5 to 3,3 and King to King's level 3. Sorry. These three lines are "edges" and the space inside of them is a "polygon." Fill in the polygon with a light pencil; that's the "face" of our new polygon. Congratulations; you've made a mesh. Now use 3-dimensional graph paper and plot about 1,500 vertices, and you'll have a Poser mesh. (If anyone cares, the line the pencil made was actually a "closed polyline") Open up an .obj file in a text editor. Come on, don't be afraid. Most of it will be a big list of numbers in groups of three. Vertices.

"The Hip Mesh Connects to the Thigh Mesh" An .obj file can be interesting, but it isn't a poser figure. Anything from "Casual Man" to "Batman Beyond" is a poser "character." Outside of tweaky little details on color and costume most of a character file is a big table of instructions to Poser on where to go for the geometry and how to connect it all together. Oddly enough, most of the .cr2 of different characters is identical. Kinda like the DNA of us and Brine Shrimp. Open up a .cr2 in a text editor. Near the top you find; figureResFile :Runtime:Geometries:newFemaleNudeHi:femaleNudeHiP3.obj Simple enough, no? This character is based on the P3 New Female Nude, and will look in the Runtime:Geometries folder to find it. Now is as good a time as any to note that some geometries -- hair, often -- can be included in the .cr2 itself. Near the bottom of a .cr2 is a stack of "addChild" and "weld" and "inkyChain" definitions. Our poor Poser dame is neatly sliced in a dozen places like a magician's trick gone horribly awry. Here is where the meshes are all connected together again, and told to behave as one. Given a little text document with the suffix .phi (a Poser Hierarchy File) Poser will attempt that same magic on a new mesh to create an original prop or figure. I will not say more here, except to note that Poser will not move any of the meshes it is connecting. The best welds will come if the original meshes are in their proper alignment and butting against each other. But that's another subject.

"Let's get bent"

If this was all there was to it, why would you need Poser? You can create links in Bryce, after all. In something like Ray Dream you can even set link parameters and IK. Poser's first magic trick is to stretch the mesh over a bend (otherwise, it would look like this...)

The next bit of magic can be edited via Poser's "joint parameters"menu, and adds bulging and creasing and so forth to make the joints more realistic. And what is happening under the hood? Well, Poser is shifting the position of vertices in a zone around the joint. No matter how contorted the figure, the number of vertices never changes. Of course, as anyone who has been in figure drawing realizes, the external shape of the joints on a real body defined by bones under the skin, bulging of muscle groups, and so forth. The Poser joints were tweaked by experts, but they still aren't realistic for extreme poses.

"Altered States"

Okay, so you can move a hand around on the wrist, clench fingers and make a fist. How can you make a frown? The brow is one big surface -- and, naturally enough, defined by one big mesh.

Well, the answer was a cunning one. Someone took the poser head into another 3d application and moved a few vertices to make a frowning head. Then did a little routine called "apply morph target" within Poser and saved the character file.

If you were to open that new .cr2 in a text editor you would find a giant table of numbers with a "d" prefix. These are deltas; a table telling Poser the difference between the mesh it already knows about and the morph being applied.

Which means the geometry -- the copyrighted object file -- remains with the creator of the morph. There is no possible way to reverse-engineer the original morph from the delta's into the .cr2 file. It also means Poser 4 morphs will do nothing to a Poser 3 base geometry. It just isn't the same vertices, not to mention the same number of vertices.

If you do have a Poser3 morph within a .cr2 it is quite possible to cut and paste it into a new character by using a text editor -- for which I direct you to someone else's tutorial!

Anyhow, the deltas are referred to as a "target" because, using the dials, you can move a little towards them, a lot, even none at all or away from them. And you can simultaneously move towards several other targets as well. The final position of the vertices are a combination of all these operations; morphs, creasing, proportions and scaling, etc.

"It's er, it's green"

So what is so special about those texture files? Now, at last, we get to talk about the dreaded "UV Map." A UV Map is like a Mercator map of a mesh. You know, those maps of the world that look like an orange peel spread out flat? It is the whole mesh flattened out into 2d. This data -- how to map each vertex at x,y,z coordinates to a potential pixel at u,v coordinates, is part of the .obj file. Thus, any image with the correct name and pixel size can be attached as a texture.

No matter how the x,y,z coordinates of the vertices are transformed, via scaling, bending, morphing (all the processes of character creation), they each maintain a one-to-one relationship to their corresponding u,v coordinate. Thus your figure can be doing a flying spin kick, but her lipstick will remain on her lips.

This same mapping applies to bump maps and transparency maps. The latter will not display in Poser 3, but they are quite useful once imported into Bryce.

And, yes. UV mapping works wonderfully in Bryce. Poser characters tend to lose their original texture when imported into Bryce 3d, though. You will need to re-apply the poser texture map in Bryce; as a picture texture, using parametric mapping. It also may be necessary to flip the texture 180, top to bottom. It shouldn't be necessary to point out that the texture needs to be applied to the group it started with; for the P3 nude figure, for instance, you need to select all of the body including eyes but not including hair, and group that before going into the Materials Lab.

And when you've done that, you might just want to run out and get Steve Cox's UV Mapper and paint up the surfaces of all your models! Incidently, Poser3 has a second life as a model format converter from .dxf to a .obj compatible with UV Mapper.

"There'll be a quiz" As an example, a project I am working on uses the Poser 3 female nude. I need to have "femaleNudeHiP3.obj" in the folder "newFemaleNudeHi" in the folder "Geometries" in the folder "Runtime." Or, to use the simpler notation; "Runtime:Geometries:newFemaleNudeHi:femaleNudeHiP3.obj" The character file is "Runtime:libraries:Anime folder:Anime7.cr2" There is an associated resource for the thumbnail picture and name in the Poser window -- but the Mac handles that sort of thing invisibly. Within the .cr2 is two pages of geometry describing a hair prop, and many pages of deltas used by the morphs. You will never see the file "smallmouth.obj" that I used to create one of those morphs; all that Poser will ever need to know about that file is now included in the .cr2 Way out in "Runtime:textures:anime:anime4.pict" is a texture file for the base figure. Note, please, that all of the files I used were worked on outside of Poser, within Ray Dream, Photoshop, and Word. Poser is not good about "seeing" files that don't have the correct creator type. On the PC this is not an issue; the suffix is used. The daring Mac user can go into ResEdit to fix them -- or merely drop the files on MacConverter. Takes about two seconds, and the program is freeware. Hard choice, no? "Lights, Camera..." The last major Poser file format is the .pz3 It is oddly similar to the .cr2 In fact, most of it is a .cr2 What a .pz3 adds is lights and camera positions. It can also handle more than one figure. You may say "Well, I'm not saving Tango dance moves here." Sorry, there is more power in this format than meets the eye. Poser 3, of which I am most suited to speak, has no conforming clothing. It is possible, however, to call an item of clothing a character and give it a complete .cr2 file. You can actually pose a carefully-made outfit this way. Just make sure both the base character and the clothing are given exactly the same pose. Hats and shoes, on the other hand, are usually better parented. But that's for a different discussion. The important thing to remember is that a .pz3 file -- which is allowed to live where ever it wants to -- will be looking for all kinds of .obj files as it attempts to create an entire Poser setting, from fence posts to cowboy hat. Fortunately, if any of it works correctly, you can save the results in a series of simpler .cr2 files and start on building your own new character. That is, unless Xena, Warrior Princess was all you wanted in the first place!