Attached Link: http://mysite.freeserve.com/sf/zip/holdit.zip

I have made what I think is a very interesting discovery. Im not saying I am the first to discover this, but I have never seen or herd of this before, so I think I may be :) In a recent thread alphauser51 asked How do I lock a figures hands into place on an object. And I answered, It cant be done. As usual I was wrong! Did you know that you can parent figures hands to a prop, so that when the prop moves the hands follow! This is parenting the HANDS to a prop, NOT the prop to a hand. Method: 1. Load the figure and prop, and pose both. 2. Parent the prop to the figures chest (this is because the chest is the common base of the hands). 3. Save the figure to a pallet (because the prop is parented to the figure it will save with it). 4. Open the cr2 in a text editor and search for rHand. Change the line beginning with inkyParent to read inkyParent MyProp:1, where MyProp is the name of the prop. 5. Repeat step #4 for lHand, and resave the file. 6. Now load the cr2 in the Poser interface. Try moving the prop, nothing has changed. Now from the Figure menu in the Poser interface select Use Inverse Kinematics, and turn them on for the right and left hands, try moving the prop again, now the hands and arms will follow the prop! If you need to re-pose the prop just turn off Inverse Kinematics, pose it, then turn them back on The link at the top of this page is to an example cr2, with Posette holding a P4 box prop. Les Bentley. 26/01/03

The relevent bit of the cr2 looks like this: actor rHand:1 { name rHand on bend 1 dynamicsLock 0 hidden 0 addToMenu 1 castsShadow 1 includeInDepthCue 1 parent rForeArm:1 inkyParent box_1:1 nonInkyParent rForeArm:1 channels Where "box_1:1" is your prop.

That's pretty cool, les. Sounds like it could be useful. mac

Should be good for two handed claymores, battle axes, pikes, etc.

Cool, can you substitute the box with a figure, or body part???

Do you really need all that complexity? When I simply parent both hands to the box in the hierarchy editor, then move the box, the arms follow properly... within the usual limits of what IK can do. (IK needs to be ON for both arms before the parenting.)

ockham...you are the man.. your right. it was so simple parent both hands in the hierarchy editor.. thanks much

Looks like I fell flat on my face here. I have been using P4 for quite some time. I was always under the impression that a body part could only have one parent, and that the one parent of the hand had to be the forearm. Therefore I was surprised when I tried the technique mentioned above and it worked. Looks like I have discovered a complicated way of doing a simple thing that every one has known how to do for years. I think I will go and crawl under a rock now.

Les, if it weren't for people like you, where would we all be? Seriously, people with the sight and shear determination make Poser as useful as it is. It's not because that is how it was designed, but because someone out there wouldn't accept that it couldn't be done!!! Keep it up, nothing is impossible. Hey, do you think you can fix P5 for me????

Well...I'm glad Les checked this out.  I was able to parent one hand -- after a struggle -- but now for some reason Poser has decided parenting is out.

I also discovered that the hands get very messed up with hidden rotations.  So I created a new hybrid figure in which the inkey goal is a helper object called "wrists" (parented to the forearm).  Now the hands don't get all crunched up as I move the prop around.

Going to restart Poser before I give up on parenting in the Hierachy editor.  It worked once.  For whatever reason it doesn't work now...

A body part can only have ONE parent.  There is more going on here than meets the eye (which makes it appear like there is more than one parent).  There is the parenting of the actor as well as the hierarchical chain of joints - hah!  The joints always respond to their endemic hierarchy - even feet parented to BODY with IK enabled.  That's why there are calls for parent/nonInkyParent/inkyParent in the actor sections while also the addChild calls in the figure section.  The latter establishes the joint hierarchy for joint coordinate systems and deformations.  So, parent and joint hierarchies are two different relationships - the former probably requiring some Freudian analogy or something. :)

I'm rather embarrassed to see this old thread from 2003 resurface, there was a lot I did not understand about Poser back then. There still is now! :unsure:

Me, too, Les.  I think I'm getting depressed about it again.

But I was able to get the modified twin parenting to work.  Trick was putting an explicit "inkey parent" in the cr2.  At that point, the hierarchy editor allowed me to drag the parts on to that prop.  So far, though, I can't get Poser to set up that relationship just from the data in one cr2; it seems to require that I manually go into the hierarchy editor to finish the operation.

Since I was mucking about with figure hierarchy, by the way, I created a clone figure with only two physical body parts (but a complete cr2), and parented the "real" figure to it.  Unfortunately, although that worked great for imposing my new IK motions, it meant that the built-in JCMs no longer worked.

There are three requirements for an IK goal body part (in the actor section):

parent
inkyParent
nonInkyParent

parent and nonInkyParent are typically the same body part used when IK is disabled.
inkyParent is the parent body part for the goal body part when IK is enabled.

To have this reparenting happen automagically, you also need to turn on IK in the appropriate inkyChain section of the figure section in the CR2.

If you are attempting to parent the body part to a prop, then I guess it gets trickier.  The prop will need to be part of the CR2 for this to work - otherwise the inkyParent goes 'huh?'. :)

Yah, that's my thought.

That's why I thought the conform-to figure was a cute solution.  It is a blank figure made with a donor cr2, with the IK chains set as required.  I was conforming the actual DAZ figure to this special IK figure.

But there's another solution; a multi-figure cr2, or a pz3.  Either of those could store both figure with IK chain, and parented-to prop. 

I also haven't tried loading in the conform-to (the stripped down IK figure) first.  It is possible that if I do this, the DAZ figure's JCM's will crosstalk upstream to the first figure in the scene, and thus work correctly.

By the by, with all this parenting-one-thing-to-another, I was able to not only put two different IK goals on to the same prop, but I was able to put them on to a body part on a third figure.  Or two body parts, meaning there was a (second) forward kinematics chain between the two inverse kinematics goals!

The answer I see most often is parent one hand to the prop and the prop to the other hand , that way each has only one parent .

That makes a lot of sense for something like a two-handed sword, or a rifle.  You'd point it with the dominent hand, and the other hand would stay attached.

The tricky stuff I was doing was partly to keep both hands together and move the prop instead, but mostly because the hands tended to crunch up due to internal rotations as they tried to stay on goal.  Creating a second body part (the "wrists" body parts) fixed that.