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Getting rid of phantom Preview materials

Gadget Girl

Extraordinary
Contributing Artist
So as I'm both beta testing something, and working on finishing up a project of my own, I keep finding phantom image files that Poser wants, and I'm wondering if there is an easy way to get rid of them.

Here's what I mean by phantom. I load an item into my scene and it asks me to find a missing material file, one that I was using at one point, often as a starting point for the real materials, but no longer am. At first I went to the material room and looked for any image map brick that was referencing them, but I couldn't find a reference to them anywhere. Even in the preview materials.

Then it started happening to me on another project that I'm a beta tester on. In that case everything seems to display just fine, but overtime I load the texture it asks me for the wrong files.

I started opening up .cr2s at that point and I found that Poser was trying to find these image files to use in the preview materials. Is there an easy way to get rid of these? or do I need to go in and hand edit all the files?
 

Dawn

Engaged
Contributing Artist
Hiya, I get this sometimes, usually it's a png map left over from hex.

It might also be in the initial info section.
If you go into the prop/figure script in notepad or wordpad and scroll down to the part where it starts the materials information you may see a path to an image amongst the initial block of script, they should all say NO_MAP

below is the part I mean. Check this out and if there is a path, remove it and copy the NO_MAP wording from one of the other lines.

I do not know of any way other than alter the script. If it is in the preview, replace the path with the NO_MAP bit
upload_2016-8-13_14-45-9.png
 

Gadget Girl

Extraordinary
Contributing Artist
Thanks. This is basically what I went ahead and did. I was just wondering if there was an easier way to 'clean' up the the preview materials. In my particular case I know they came from within Poser itself, as they were one of the first materials I applied in Poser when I was first working on the prop.

When I started going through by hand and editing them out, it seemed like they maybe weren't all in the preview materials, although I was just trying to make them go away so I might be wrong about that. Next time it happens I'll have to pay closer attention, because if it is just the Preview material that has them, I should be able to make a script to clean them up, although if they are just all over the place that would be hard.
 

3dcheapskate

Engaged
You may well find that you have an unconnected 'Image_Map' node in one of your materials, but when you look in the material room advanced tab you don't see it because it's hidden underneath another node. This often happens to me when I cut-and-paste a node group from one material to another, and then cut-and-paste a similar node group to the same material - the original node group is still there, disconnected, but hidden under the newer nodes.

If this is the cause SnarlyGribbley's SceneFixer has a 'Remove Detached Nodes' option which fixes it in one swoop.
 

Thalek

Inspired
I use D3D's Poser File Organizer for repairing a lot of broken files; it's amazing how often phantom materials make it past the beta-test stage.

One of the options is to "Correct existing materials" which can fix unused and missing material items. I also use the option "Remove unused shader nodes", which gets rid of a lot of the phantom materials.
 
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