MeTaL Fixer Tutorial 1

Running the Program :
Double-click on the program executable to run. The splash screen comes up for 4 seconds, then goes away and the main window comes up.
Set Preferences :
Choose Edit : Preferences from the menu. .mtl & .pz3 use same filename: If the name of your .mtl file and .pz3 file are exactly the same, select this and you'll only have to select the .mtl file. The program will find the .pz3 file. Beep at Completion: Select this if you want the program to beep when the process is completed. Enable Speech: Mac only, disabled Enable Sound: Select this if you want the program sound (progress bar, button clicks,, etc.) to be enabled. The beep at completion will still work even if you disable this option. Display "Done" Dialog: Select if you want the program to bring up a done message at completion. Useful if you've deselected sound and the beep. (I apologize in advance for the humor value.) Click on OK to accept and save changes.
Help :
Select Help : Help from the menu. Where: Software license, copyright info, location of download What: Short description of the tools. How: Quick and dirty instructions on running the tools. Exclamation: Disclaimer statement Click on OK to exit.
About :
Select Help : About from the menu. Brings up the splash screen with program name, description, copyright info, link to Delphi Bryce Forum and Fignations. Click on OK to close.
Close up of text panel:
Fix .obj file : use only if you get the "i/o bad media" error on importing an obj into Bryce.
Start MeTaL Fixer Choose File : Fix .obj File from the menu or Click on the .obj Fix... button.
Locate and select the obj file that is giving you problems, then click on Open. The program will only allow you to see obj files.
The program will process the file and show a blue and white striped progress bar at the same time. Depending on the size of your obj file, this can take from a few seconds to a few minutes. Please be patient and wait for the beep or, if you enabled sound, just wait for the music to stop and a click as the button pops back up. Please note that the program will copy your original obj to a backup file and overwrite the original obj with the fixed file. The backup obj files will have "ORIGINAL" added after the name (see pic in previous row).
Now, import the fixed obj file into Bryce. Please note, that this will only fix the "i/o bad media" error when the reason behind the error is the #IND text inserted into the obj code. If it doesn't fix the error, then you have something else happening.
Fix .mtl File :
Before you start: Make sure that you have jpeg versions of all .bum files available before you run Fix .mtl file. Bryce doesn't use the .bum files and this program converts all references of .bum to .jpg in the mtl file.
Load your figures, clothing, props, etc. into Poser, pose them, do whatever you need to there. Save your pz3 file, do not save as a compressed Poser file. Export your obj file into your Poser directory. This is very important or Bryce won't be able to find the textures. If you have multiple Runtimes for Poser 5, uh, this could present a problem unless you only use textures from one Runtime, or duplicate the texture folders in both Runtimes. Don't blame us, it's a Bryce problem, go bug Corel.
Choose File : Fix .mtl File from the menu or Click on the .mtl Fix... button.
Locate and select the mtl file, then click on Open. The program will only allow you to see mtl files here.
Locate and select the matching pz3 file, then click on Open. The program will only allow you to see pz3 files here. If you selected .mtl & .pz3 use same filename in the preferences, the program skips this step, so be careful setting this option.
The program will process the files and show a blue and white striped progress bar at the same time. Depending on the size of your pz3 and mtl files, this can take from a few seconds to a few minutes. Please be patient and wait for the beep or, if you enabled sound, just wait for the music to stop and a click as the button pops back up. Please note that the program will copy your original mtl to a backup file and overwrite the original mtl with the fixed file. The backup mtl files will have "ORIGINAL" added after the name (see pic in cell two rows up).
Import the obj file into Bryce, if all goes well, you shouldn't have to manually locate any textures or bump maps, just adjust ambience settings, bump settings, etc. Occasionally, Bryce seems to truncate the file names. We're not sure why, but it may be a character limitation in Bryce for directory structures. For example, on one import, the directory/texture name in the mtl file was "runtime\textures\Zygote\Characters\MilWom\MilHeadM2.jpg", but Bryce said that it couldn't find "runtime\textures\Zygote\Characters\MilWom\MilHead.jpg". Fortunately, the file open window opened up in the Zygote\Characters\MilWom directory and all I had to do was select the correct texture. Not too shabby though.
Temporary Fix for Poser 5 Users :
It seems that there is a slight enough difference in the P5 pz3 files that MeTaL Fixer has a problem with them. We are working on this, but it will be about a week before HT can do so. Unfortunately, I only discovered this last night (9/24/02). In the meantime, you can fix the problem in one of two ways: 1. After saving the pz3 file in P5, open it in P4 (OK on the previous version message) and resave it using a new filename. Now, run MeTaL Fixer on the mtl file using the renamed pz3 P4 file. OR 2 After you run the mtl fix (using the P5 pz3 file), open the mtl file in WordPad and look at the first pathname. It will look something like this, depending on your directory structure: map_Kd D\\Poser 4runtime\textures\DAZ\Characters\MilWom\V2HeadM.jpg map_Bump D\\Poser 4runtime\textures\DAZ\Characters\MilWom\V2HeadBump.jpg To fix, simply do a find/replace to delete the pathnames in front of 'runtime', for example, I would replace 'D\\Poser 4' with nothing. Save the mtl file and import the obj into Bryce. This will be fixed in the next revision of MeTaL Fixer, but until then, this is a fairly quick fix.
Part 2 - Getting Transparency Maps into Bryce