I bet y'all are tired of hearing all this newbish stuff from me, *heh* Anywho, this is a model I whipped up tonight, a furmaid. Since it's a reletively simple model, I decided to see what I could do with it in Poser 3. You can see what the problem is. Even though I set the paremeters (well, the crosshair things, whatever they're called ;) ) parts of the model don't move properly. Seems that the problem lies in areas that have a red crosshair. The arms and most of the tail pose pretty much as well as the the preset P3 models do, but the "hip" and end of the tail (which have red crosshairs) act like seperate objects. As far as I can tell everything is set the way it is in the tuts, and the hierarchy seems fine. Any hints?

Anywho, this is a model I whipped up tonight, a furmaid.

Oh, cool, someone beat me to it ....

Any hints?

Could be a hierarchy or mesh-grouping issue. The red crosshairs indicate the endpoint of a joint. As far as I know, they only appear on the root joint (for most figures, the hip), or at the end of a hierarchy chain (head, toes, fingers, tailtip, etc.).

Can you explain further what you mean by the hip and tail operating as separate objects?

Thanks

Hi SF102, Nice looking model! ;=] You might want to check any IK chains that may exist. IK chains will produce "intermediate end-points" on a figure. cheers, dr geep ;=]

I'll use Seraphina the dragon (minus wings) to show what's going on, because the problems are far worse for her. In this pic you can see that since I added an extra joint at the shoulder (lcollar and rcollar) the arms of my figures pose fairly well now. The fingers need work, but they don't show the crazy deformations that I get with other parts, so ignore them.

BTW, none of my figures so far have IK at all. IK just gets in my way right now, I haven't reached that skill level yet ;)

This pic shows part of what I mean by parts acting as seperate objects. You can see it more on the furmaid above. The "hip" is seperate from the "abdomen" even when it's not posed. There's a huge seam at the joint, and when posed the parts move away from each other. On Seraphina, her neck refuses to pose as single unit, and instead breaks up into its parts, and also, for some odd reason, deforms the chest as well.

This shows what happens when the head is moved. The green crosshair is located on the joint between the last neck section and the head itself. When I try to move the head, only the child objects (the eyes, spines, and tounge) move, and the head "squishes" in a rather grotesque way.

The rear legs should move like the arms, but they don't. This shows where the crosshairs for the foot are.

And this shows what happens when I try to move the foot upwards, into a standing position. The "hip" area deforms a bit when the "thigh" is moved, but that's mostly because I cut the figure wrong. I need to remodel the thigh area because it doesn't join the body correctly, and looks off. Anyway, when the foot is moved it doesn't really move at all, it just twists around. The box tracking shows it moving correctly, but the real model does this. It also deforms the parent object (the "shin") even though I didn't move it.

Probably best to start at the top and work down. In your hierarchy file do you have the parenting correct? If its not one result will be that the mesh splits when posing. Next have you got the joint rotations correct for each body part? The first order of rotation must be axial to the body part. The other two are less important but a good rule of thumb is to put the most often bent last. Finally are you using spherical fall off zones at the arm/chest and leg/hip joints? You'll almost certainly need them.

I'm betting that a lot of the problem lies in the hierarchy file. The parenting is correct as far as I can tell, but it's still posible that some small detail is wrong. As for the rotations, they're at least mostly correct for the dragon, and I didn't really do anything about them for the furmaid. As far as I could tell, the rotation oder only determines which way something will go for each command. If it doesn't go the right way for X Rotate, it probably will for Y Rotate. As for spherical falloff, Poser 3 doesn't display that option in the dialog. Well, it does when you click on a joint, but only for a moment before it switches to the standard dialog. I don't have the programming skills to edit a cr2.