I hope I have the right forum to post this to, as I saw no general Poser Forum... I was wondering if anyone could help me with a small issue I'm having. I created a simple bar using primitives in Poser (my very 1st attempt at an original model)I've got the bar pretty much how I want it & made one piece for the gate that would swing up to enter/exit behind the bar. The problem is that because of the distortions I made to the "box" primitive, I cannot seem to get any rotates to get my bar gate to swing up as it should. I have attached screenshots of the results using the different rotates. If anyone has some thoughts of how I can get this to work I'd love to hear them! Thanks! - John

The general Poser Forum is there: see the Software Forums dropdown list on your right. To prevent that gate distortion, first flatten your box in the zero position, adjust the axis of rotation correctly, then export as object. Delete the box in your scene, then re-import the obj with all checkboxes unchecked. It should now z-rotate without distortion, but you might have to re-adjust the rotation axis again.

Ahh ok, thanks! I never thought of that

You should also check where the centre of your object is. The rotation uses the centre as the pivot point, and it would have to be on the edge where you want the joint to be. Search in the Poser General forum for the excellent tutorial by DR Geep about centres and moving them.

The cause of the distortion in these situations is the 'propagatingScale' channels, Poser primitives use 'propagatingScale' channels which means that if you scale a parent prop its chilldren will automaticly scale with it, but when the parent prop is scaled the direction of the scaling will remain relitive to the parent, not the child. When you export then re-import a Poser primitive Poser adds 'scale' channels, not 'propagatingScale' channels, so you don't get the distortions when you rotate the child. Of course it has to be the parent prop that is exported and re-imported, just doing it with the child will have no effect. An alternative to exporting then re-importing an object would be to open the pp2 (I asume it's a pp2) in a text editor and change the channel types from 'propagatingScale' to 'scale'. However after doing this you would need to re-scale the child prop, you would probably need to reposition it too. To get the pivot point "hinge" or more correctly in Poser speak 'Origin' in the right place, from the menu bar do; Object > Properties > Display Origin, this un-hides the OffsetA (Origin) channels in the paramiters pallet. It's best to set the origin before translating or scaling the prop, othewise moving the origin may move the prop.