Unimportant Historical Question.
bshugs1525871
Posts: 183
Forgive the intrusion. I'm fairly new to 3D art - only a few years - and there's something that's nagging me. Something that I'm sure any vet or old-head knows. The question is mostly outdated with the new folder struction, for Daz anyway, but here it goes:
When and Why did material settings and textures start getting added to the "Pose" section of the (Poser) Runtime library. I've picked up a fair amount of older stuff on sale and freebee and have (only?) hundreds of folder, but I'll be darned if I can find many actual 'poses'. Most of them are material settings. There is (now?) a Materials section, but it's mostly empty.
Thanks to anyone who's memory spans back far enough to remember and is willing to admit it. (I'm old enough, but wasn't involved back then. 
)
Otherwise, I'll let this little thread die on the vine.
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Comments
As far as I know.. (I've been around for 10 years but have always been mostly a DS person) the material room wasn't added until fairly later (was it verson 4 or 5?) material presets were a hack of pose files because the original developers of Poser didn't think changing mats would be a thing? IDK.. seems pretty silly now.
Don't feel like editing..
I guess it stayed that way (in the pose folder mostly) because it became the normal place for them.. and also because for a long while DS could read mats from the pose folder but not from the material folder so if you wanted your product to at least sorta work in DS without making a specific DS version you had to put them in pose.
Originally a mat pose was a complete hack someone worked out in order to make it easier to put textures on to models. When people first started using poser they had to add each material manually, until someone worked out the mat pose thing. Even then when you wanted to distribute a mat pose with your product you had to type it all out manually. Then some nice person invented a little program to do it automatically, making it easier for people to distribute things with textures that could be applied with one click of the mouse. That was when Poser 4 was the latest Poser version. There was even a plug-in that used Python scripts that was sold in the store here, which could make the Mat poses, so we all got lazy and kept using them. That one stopped working when Poser changed the Python version in P8, and I for one cursed mightlily, as I would have to learn to do things a different way.
Also because, until Poser 8, you had to go to the Materials room in Poser to get the Materials library so putting mat files in the Pose library made them more accessible.
I was thinking of asking the same thing as the OP; I'm glad I saw this thread.
To be exact, the hack was to apply the materials with a pose file, or PZ2 file. Because of how Poser worked back then, this could only be placed in the Poses directory, and could only be used on figures (and in later versions, props smartpropped to figures). In Poser 5 they came out with the Material Room, and many merchants (myself included) started including both PZ2 and MC5 / MC6 files for materials.
MT5 was Poser 5, and was like a DS Shader Preset - it had settings that could be applied to a single selected surface. .MC6, which is like a Mat pose or a DS Materials preset, was added in Poser 6.
MPE = Mat Pose Edit ?
Indeed that is the one I first used, but I was thinking of Shader Spider.
Back when I first started making freebies I didn't know Poser had gained the ability to make MAT poses easily... I was aware from earlier versions of Poser that you needed to either hack the file or have a script. I assume most of the tutorials I read on the subject were outdated, and whenever I asked about it, I assume that the people who replied either themselves still did it that way or I worded my question in a way that made them assume I was still working in a much older version... Being that I was on a Mac, from what I was able to find, the commercial scripts only mentioned Windows, so I used to painfully hack whatever I wanted to make a pose for... In truth only maybe three big models, but it was terribly tedious... Then one day I pick up a Poser book from the bookstore and in it there was a walkthrough for changing materials... I was confused that all you had to to was click a few boxes and Bob became your uncle... Bam- a MAT pose... Talk about feeling stupid.
To this day whenever I see someone ask a person who is requesting information on a method that is outdated, "Why do you want to do it that way, are you aware that this is no longer necessary or the easy way?", I want to commend them.
I'm glad this question was asked. Over the summer when I started learning these programs, I grabbed a bunch of free Poser stuff... man was I confused when I found them in the Pose folder. I was searching high and low everywhere else.
I had shader spider but did not use it much because soon after I got it, I upgraded poser which broke the plugin.
WOW! Was AFK for a while and just got a chance to go through the repsonses. Thank you all very much for taking the time to answer. Like 'dialing' a telephone that hasn't had a dial in 20+ years, some things make perfect sense when you have the background story.
Thanks again. I can now sleep at night.
On a related, but equally unimportant topic: Why are M4/V4 and later characters under Figures->People in the Smart Content, but just People in the Content LIbrary . Earlier models (M2, etc) are under People in Smart Content, while Figure has animals, etc.
In short (because I have three brain cells and two of them spend the whole day fighting) I have to keep remembering which way to go depending on which tab I'm using. Wouldn't it have made sense to more closely alighn the two structures?
Figures is the Poser library name, not soemthing Daz can change. The native Daz Studio files aren't split into libraries in the same way.