I made two new characters with 3DMax so far and they could both use existing poses for V3 or any other. They even could use the walk designer. BUT My characters had all the body parts a human has with all the body part names from the manual. What happens if I use an existing Poses (for V3) to a character how has more/less body parts ? What will happen if this character has more that two arms ? Or no arm ar all ?

The poses will probably work ok, any figure parts that are not in your figure but are in the pose will just be ignored. You will find that some poses wont work too well with your character because of the different joint parameters that other characters have, you can work that out through trial and error.

If a body part entry in a pose file corresponds with a body part in the figure, it's applied. (Easy.) If a body part entry in a pose file has no corresponding part in the figure, it's ignored. You may get an error message, but unlike many Poser error messages, it isn't fatal. :) If a figure has a body part but there is no entry in the pose file, that body part stays where it is. That's how 'partial poses' are made, which affect only certain parts of the figure.

thanks a lot

As possibly illustrative... I built a goony looking robot dude with only a torso; no seperate abdomen or chest (legs and arms were fully jointed). In testing him out I applied a bunch of the Poser4 library poses. He looked awefully cute doing the "Aphrodite Arising from the Waves" pose! I also applied standard hand poses despite him having even less fingers than a Disney character.

It has been said above that: "If a body part entry in a pose file has no corresponding part in the figure, it's ignored." This is not quite correct! Pose data for body part that does not exist will spill over into another character in the document that does have that body part. EXPERIMENT: Load Victoria 2, or any character that has an "upNeck" actor. Apply any pose to V2, now select the Upper Neck and Y rotate (Twist) it 180. Save the pose to a pallet. Use Shift+Ctrl+F to restore the figure. Now load the P4 Nude Woman into the same document, xTran her Body a bit so as not to overlap V2, now apply the pose you saved to the P4 Nude Woman. You should see Victoria's head rotate 180. The P4 Nude Woman does not have an upNeck actor, so that part of the pose spilled over to the first available figure that does, Victoria.

Oh yeah. I knew that. I posted a triumphant thread to PoserPros on that very subject. :) Really must get that brain replaced.

To address the broader question "How do Poses really work?". A pose file is a means of injecting data into an element (for want of a better word) in a Poser document. Standard poses, the ones saved from the Poser 4 interface, save "k" ("keys" line) values for rotation, translation, and morph (targetGeom) channels, essentially these are the values that appear above a dial in the Paramiters Pallet. Pose files are plain text files (but in P5 they may be compressed), they can be edited in a text editor (I use EditPad Lite, or a cr2 editor (e.g. CR2Builder). Here is a snippet from a pose file:

actor hip:1
        {
        channels
                {
                rotateY yrot
                        {
                        keys
                                {
                                k  0  -6.5
                                }
                        }

The first line defines the actor (body part) that the pose applies to, the colon/number ":1" is optional. The third line defines the "channels" block. The fith line "rotateY yrot" is a channel type (what the channel does) "rotateY", plus the internal name of the channel "yrot". The seventh line difines the start of the "keys" (frame #'s and paramiter values). The nineth "k" line is the real meat in this example, all that the previous lins do is to point to the location of this line within the figure (or prop, or whatever). The "k" line contains two numbers, the first is the frame number, in a static pose this will always be "0", in an animation pose there may be many "frame numbers, each refering to a diffrent frame in the animation. The second number "-6.5" is the paramiter value, it says "set this dial to minus six point five", it is this number that does the actual posing. Note that each opening brace "{" within the file must have a corrisponding closing brace "}", miss matched braces are a common cause of problems in Poser files. In the above example the pose file injects a value for a rotation channel, however pose files can be constructed (in a text editor) to inject many other things, scaling, material settings, morph targets (deltas), and a whole hoste of others. One thing that a pose file can not inject is a new channel, a pose file can only inject data into a channel that already exists.

Thanks a lot That was all very important information. The "spill over" was very unexpected.