Welcome to the home page for the MeTaL Fixer, a small, free utility to add the pathnames to your MTL file so that Bryce can import them without asking you to locate them. As a bonus, it also fixes the majority of the I/O Bad Media Errors that you sometimes get when importing Poser OBJs into Bryce.

Download  MeTaL Fixer at the Delphi Bryce Forum - PC only

Note: The Delphi Forums do not require membership to enter the forums or to download this file, you may enter as a guest. However, we encourage you to sign up for a free account and join our great community.

View the MeTaL Fixer Tutorial - added temporary fix for P5 Users - 9/25/02

  • What is the MeTaL Fixer?
    • This tool extracts the pathnames to textures in Poser .pz3 files and puts those pathnames into the .mtl file that is created when an obj file is exported from Poser. This allows you to import the obj into Bryce without having to find the textures manually
    • This tool also replaces the #IND in obj files with zero, for those obj's that give an I/O Bad Media error when importing into Bryce.
  • How did this tool come about and why do I need it?
    • OBJ Replace
      • Well, I have a tutorial I did for this, but basically, sometimes Poser puts some extra characters into the obj file and when imported into Bryce, you get a I/O Bad Media error. You can replace these manually using my tutorial, or use this tool to do it for you.
    • MTL Replace
      • Well, when you export a figure from Poser as an obj file, it creates an mtl file that tells the program what textures to use for the obj being imported. Unfortunately, Poser doesn't save the directory information telling the program exactly where to find the texture, so it automatically looks in the folder it is saved in and since the textures aren't there, it can't find them.
      • One solution is to locate all the textures you used, copy them, then place them into a temporary folder along with the obj file and mtl file.
      • Or, just locate the textures manually when (or if) the program asks you to find them.
      • Now, this is really silly because if you open the .pz3 file, it has the exact pathname where the texture is located.
      • I won't go into the details on how I worked this out, but you can read about it here (enter as guest if you don't have an account at Delphi, but accounts are free!).
      • If an item of clothing, etc. has a bump map and a transparency map, you'll have to add it in separately in Bryce, since the mtl file can only handle one bump map. You can get around this, however, using the MeTaL Fixer (see the tutorial).
    • Things that the program had to consider:
      • Image maps could be .jpg, .tif, or .bum formats
      • Pathnames in the pz3 file could be separated by backslashes (\) or colons (:) depending on how the person who created the figure/prop/hair/mat file entered in the pathname or the operating system.
  • Why isn't there a Mac version?
    • That's a very good question and we have a very reasonable explanation for that. We tried to do a Mac version, really we did! Unfortunately, I'm on a PC, Hangtime only has Poser 3, and every time our volunteers tried to add pathnames in the mtl file, Bryce would either crash on import, or ignore everything and import the mesh without any textures.
    • So then, we looked inside the Mac pz3 file and saw that there are these numbers under the texture name. On a PC, those numbers are zeroes, but on the Mac, they look like this:
      • textureMap "M2HeadM2.jpg"
        -1 173584
        bumpMap "V2HeadBump.bum"
        -1 173759
      • So, we started thinking that maybe these numbers had to do with how the Mac version was able to store just texture names in the pz3 file and that this number correlated to folders on the Mac.
      • I posted a message at the Renderosity Poser Technical forum and according to VK, who answered my post, the -1 refers to the drive number and the longer number refers to the directory id.

        He also said, and I quote:

        Poser for Mac evaluates the IDs faster than text. Because of this, a pathname is converted to IDs, and the IDs are stored in the pz3 document. To find out the IDs of a specific folder, you can for example locate a texture map within this folder in Poser's Material Editor, then save the document, re-open it in a text editor, and inspect the textureMap lines.
      • Okay, this is fine, but we don't know enough about how the Mac does this in order to allow the program to get the directory info and put it into the mtl file, then, once we get it there, how do we get Bryce to accept it and not crash?
      • If anyone has an answer to this, we would greatly appreciate any help you can give us.
      • And we will continue to try to get out a Mac version if at all possible.
  • Our thanks to:
  • Testimonials
    • Vic Haynes - I love the program..... in my first use it saved me close to 1 hour in importing textures. It was able to handle the large files I had with ease.
    • ... send yours in!
  • Program copyright 2002 by HangTime. A big thanks to HT for taking my idea and making it a reality.
  • We have tested this program to the best of our ability, however, we cannot be responsible for how it works with your computer or anything that happens as a result of your use of this program. By downloading this program, you accept all responsibility for your use of the program. Please make backup copies of your work (especially the pz3 files) prior to using this program.

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