The Tin Can: Texturing lost after reopening a saved scene

NorthOf45

I was working on an older set, Stonemason's The Tin Can, converting it to Iray, mainly the lights (lots of ambients to replace). The surfaces are fairly easy, and I was just going with straight DAZ Iray Uber to start.

So, I changed all the lights, made a few renders, tweaked the lights, and eventually saved as a .duf scene to continue later.

Thing is, when I re-open the scene file, all the textures are simple colours, basically the average of the bitmap used for any given surface. Now, there's a lot of detail in those texture maps, it's a beaten-up old space ship or base interior with lots of wear and tear. The surface settings still show the original texture bitmaps in all their grungy glory, but the viewport and any renders are all blandness. The original uses the DAZ Studio Default shader on all surfaces, nothing fancy.

I hadn't converted the surfaces yet, so I thought maybe mixing Iray and 3DL might have mucked things up, but there are many products that mix the two. I tried saving again with a clean load of the original scene file (.daz format) which loads and previews as advertised. I didn't alter a single thing, just immediately saved as a scene, and the same thing happened when I loaded that saved scene. Total blandness. Removing a bitmap from a surface and adding it back in has no effect.

I tried a couple other contemporary products (Urban Future 2, The Arc, Tin Pan Alley, all with a .daz format) but they save and load as .duf no problem. Kind of useless to continue with this product if I can't reproduce the scene. Can someone else with "The Tin Can" see if this happens with them? And if so, what the heck is wrong?

Studio version 4.10.0.107

Attached are, hopefully in order, renders of:

1) What I was working on (Iray)

2) What I get after reloading (Iray)

3) Untouched load from original product, with lights (3DL)

4) Reloaded what was saved from 3 above (3DL)

NorthOf45

Well, I found out what the problem is, but don't understand how or why it happens. When saving the DS version, all UV info is lost. Looking at any material or node in UV View shows a big white square. The original has all sorts of complex maps, so that explains why the textures are all messed up, even after re-applying them.

I was zoned in so much on the DS version, that I forgot that there was a Poser version also. That one can be saved as a scene and reloaded (in .duf format) with no loss of UV info. I have my Iray lights, and now I can continue with the rest.