I just thought I would pass this on, as the way it came to light it may not be known to many people yet. It seems that most of us used to think that before you could apply a pose to a prop the prop had to be parented to a figure. Not so! Folloing a discovery by Migal, it is now posible to apply a pose (e.g. a MAT, rotation, translation, etc) to a prop without the need for the prop to have a parent. The simple secret to achieving this is to open the pz2 file in a text editor and replace any occurence of the the word "prop" with "actor", e.g: prop box_1 becomes: actor box_1 The only precondition to applying the pose seems to be that a figure must be loaded in the document. I tested this theory on the Poser BOX.PP2, and it worked for translations, rotations, scale, texture map, and object colour, and I suspect it will work on anything else you can think of. Attached above is an example PZ2 for the Poser 4 BOX.PP2.

Way to go, Les; and thanks to Migal also.

thank you

Very good, les. I have to try this out. While I was messing around with SET files, I did something similar. I came up with the method of using a generic BODY tag for translations, rotations, etc. It means you can apply the same SET to any figure at all. As long as Poser sees a BODY in the scene, it will apply the SET. I then tried adding actors from more than one figure to the SET. What Poser does is, run through every actor in the scene until it finds the one it's looking for, and modifies it. Which is something like what you're doing here. Have you tried adding the actor box_1 to the MAT for a figure? In theory, this should work. You could apply the MAT to the figure, and simultaneously, apply it to the prop. I must play around with this. Good one. mac

Mac, Could you post a little sample of the SET stuff you're talking about?

Sure, Migal. This is one is for 2 figures, a room and a window. The actors 'fill' are in the window, and the actor 'cutout' is in the room, (which is a separate figure).

When this SET is applied to the window figure, it moves the BODY (Xtrans), switches on one 'fill', switches off the other 5, and switches off the cutout (from the room figure)

{
        version
        {
                number 4.01
        }
        actor BODY:1
        {
                channels
                {
                        translateX xtran
                        {
                                keys
                                {
                                        k 0  -0.6975
                                }
                        }
                }
        }
        actor fill_1:1
        {
                off
        }
        actor fill_2:1
        {
                off
        }
        actor fill_3:1
        {
                on
        }
        actor fill_4:1
        {
                off
        }
        actor fill_5:1
        {
                off
        }
        actor fill_6:1
        {
                off
        }
        actor cutout_1:1
        {
                off
        }

}

This is just to demonstrate that you can add as many actors to a SET as you like, as long as you don't specify a figure, but just use 'BODY:1'. This one has a BODY translation, but if you're just affecting specific actors, you can have any figure at all selected, click the SET, and Poser will look through all the figures in the scene until it finds the correct actors to modify.

You cannot use this for MAT files. If you do, Poser just adds the extra materials to the figure you apply it to, It doesn't go looking for other figures with those materials. Pity...

mac

I see what you're saying. Thanks for the sample, Mac.

Very useful and elegant method. Thanks for the idea.

Are you saying that there has to be a figure in the scene in addition to my prop for the Mat pose to work? also can you recommend a good phi editor? Thanks

Poser 4 won't even display the tick (U.S. check) mark to apply a pose at the bottom of the Pose pallet unless at least one figure is loaded in the document. A workround is to convert a Poser square prop into a figure, set visibility off for the square_1 actor, then with this figure loaded set the preferred state. This will cause the invisible figure to load in the default doc so that you can immediately apply poses to props, it's also handy for parenting a group of items to so that they can be moved or scaled together. If you prefer you could also use a NULL Figure instead, but then you could not use it to move or scale groups, because a NULL figure does not usually have any translation or scale channels.

To confirm what les said, yes, a figure must be loaded before any prop will accept MAT files. What happens is that MAT Pose files can only be applied to a figure's body parts (known as actors). When a prop is 'smart', poser treats it as an actor and you can use MATs. When it's just 'dumb', it's not an actor, but a prop, therefore no MATs. PHI Builder is the one I use. It's free and you'll find it in the Utilities section of Freestuff on this site. mac

Make this even easier. Save your prop as a figure, change the file name from CR2 to PZ2 and move it to your props folder. Start a new scene and add your prop, since it has all of the necessary figure stuff it will accept MATs and Poses just fine. Only caveat to this is if you save the scene and look at it you will see your "prop" listed as the figure it is. You can try it our by simply copying one of your CR2's over to the props folder and renaming.

"Make this even easier." Well it depends. There certainly are times when converting a pp2 to a cr2 is a usefull thing to do. You say "change the file name from CR2 to PZ2" I assume you mean change it to pp2. Say I have a pp2 with two objects in it. OK, I use the Hierachy Editor to convert it to a cr2, thats one step. I use Windows Explorer to cut and paste the file into a props folder, then I change the file extention, call all that another step, but when I load the cr2 the both objects have the same material settinge even though they had diffrent ones before I converted to cr2. Thats because I needed to define groupes back before I converted to cr2, so thats a third step. I now find that when I rotate one of the objects the other one deformes, thats because "allowsBending" is set to on by default, so I have to fix that, thats a fourth step. Converting to a cr2 changed the origen for both objects, so I have to change that back to what it was before, that's step 5. Converting to a cr2 in the Hierachy Editor changed the external object references to internal geomCustom geometry, that's wasting HDD space, the original pp2 was 10KB the figure is now 81KB, so I should really open it up in a text editor and change the geometry back to external, but I'm lazy so I'll skip that, and its lucky I don't need to translate one of my objects because then I would have to unhide its translate channels which are now hidden. I now have the original pp2 plus the cr2, so I'll delete the pp2, that's step number six. OK, now I'm ready to make my pose file. Easy wasn't it? On the other hand I could just have parented my original pp2 to a figure, step #1, save a pose file (which I have to do any way, wether it's a pp2 or cr2). Then Edit the pose file in a text editor by doing a global search and replace of "prop" with "actor", the last step. The whole process including making the pose file takes about 4 or 5 minutes, and I have a small pz2 that I can distribute to anyone who already has the pp2. Now if I am going to use a lot of pose files on this thing, and I don't need to distribute them to people who already have the pp2 version, then it may well make sense to convert the pp2 to a cr2. If I only want to use 1 or 2 pose files on it, or I need to distribute pose files to people who already have the pp2, or if I am not the author of the pp2, and therefore can't distribute it as a cr2, then it makes a lot more sense to just edit the pose files as per post #1. Both procedures have their place, but I still think that the discovery of a way to apply poses to un-parented props is valuble addition to my arsenal of Poser techniques, and in at least some circumstances is a lot easier than converting to a cr2.

Hey, thanks for posting this tip! It's exactly the informmation I was looking for. After doing multiple searches and rooting through dozens of websites and tutorials, I found the answer in your tip-- so thank you, thank you, thank you!!!

re: the first post in this topic Would this work in Poser 4 and PPP as well as in Poser 5? France

Francemi, all my tests were done in Poser 4. I Imagine it would work the same in ProPack and Poser 5.

Thank you, I will try that then. ;o) France