Just a quick question.. If i apply a premade pose to one of my characters, her face changes.. not just her expression her whole face! If i apply lock actor to her head before applying the pose will this remedy that problem? I am ashamed to admit that i have used poser 4 for 3 or so years and never used this function... Once you have locked an actor is it easy to unlock? Thanks in advance for all your time!

This is a real pain when it occurs. As I understand it, this is the effect of pose makers selecting "include morphs?" when saving the pose. If you download a set of poses, there is absolutely no way of telling whether they are going to reset your character's face or not, short of hacking inside the .pz2 file with a text editor. Not good. You can easily lose that lovely face that you spent so long making. Usually the effect is to blank all the facial features to zero, rather than giving the character a different (non-zero) face. The best defence is as follows, for a character you are going to re-use. Once you have finished the face, and with all expressions set to zero, do spawn morph target on the head. Call the result "Freda" or whatever the character name is. You now have a Freda morph which is set to zero. Set all the face morphs to zero. Now set Freda to 1.0. You now have a protected character face.

I remember once having an app called Stripper, or at least I'm 90% sure that is what it was called. It allowed you to strip a .pz2 of all pose data for the head. Of course you lose any bend, twist, or side-side. Pesonally, any face that I find to be semi-useful gets saved before I screw it up. If I apply a pose that changes the head, I can reapply it. I believe you can also use Mat Pose Edit to yank out the unwanted bits.

Thankyou both for those tips. Both gratefully received.. Cheers :-)

You can apply the pose to your character and then resave that pose. When the dialog asks you if you want to include the morphs say no. You will have a new icon but the pose won't change your face next time plus you don't have to edit anything.

Lock Actor is the way to go. Its quick and easy, I use it all the time, for this problem and many others. Especially that wacky crosstalk that makes the hair go flying when you apply a pose. :)

Yes, locking the hair is a good idea.