After quite some messing around and a bit of reading, I seem to have learned that the only way to make a smoothly curving cord, rope, cable, et al is to have a great many actors in it. In various combinations of facets per actor, length of actor, et al, it appeared that Poser would only apply a bend to three facets at a time; with the center of the joint params placed in a center facet, only the facets immediately fore and aft of the joint center would move. Additional facets at either end were left untouched. I tried using spherical falloff zones....this behavior did not change. I tried using curves, and yes, with a curve channel in place more facets were shifted. However, they were shifted in unpleasant ways. As far as my experience with it goes, I think the curve channel could be useful for fabric or hair but is useless for a constant-diameter object like a cord or cable. If anyone has had different experience please let me know.

I've had similar problems in Poser. For props, one thing that works (marginally) is to create the rope using another software (It can't be a simple cylinder. It must have many facets/vertices), and then use the magnets in Poser to create the curves. It is difficult to maintain constant diameter, however. I hope this helps, Ericroy

I'm happy enough with this compromise. 20-actor cord here, hand-rigged with ERC. Each actor is a section of cylinder 12 polys in diameter and three polys in length. Created in Carrara, also my first attempt to use PHI to rough in the cr2. Boy, phi import takes a lot of cleaning up! I need to learn how to do wild-card searches in BBedit....

Here's a shot of a posable tentacle prop that I made about a 18 months ago. The model had 100 segments and was posed using a PoserPython script I wrote. As you can see, more segments will definitely give you a better curve. The script was written so that you could use any long cylinder shape not just this tentacle. I tried re-boning the Poser rattlesnake to increase the segment number and it work quite well with the script.

Yup. The key is the number of "segments" aka actors. The optimal number of polys per actor, or edge loops if you want to think that way (assuming a classical cylinder), seems out to be three. Any less and you get less length for the number of actors. Any more and you actually lose again, as the further portions of each actor will not curve. Of course, could model a cylinder in some other form....I really should post wire frame to make clear what I am using. Very cool posing there, by the way.

hey, Bushi -- is that script available anywhere?

ynsaen - Sorry, no it never reached a level of being ready for public use. There is an internal table that defines the object to pose that would be a problem for the casual user. I have a script in the works right now (really cool BTW) but when that's done I may dust this one off and finish it.

that would be great, bushi -- it looks like a killer script!