How do I make a normal prop [say an M16 rifle] into a smart prop? Any help greatly appreciated. Thanx. thefixer poser coordinator

You position it and parent it where you want it, then save it into the props library and it will ask you if you want to save it as a smart prop.

No shit, that simple huh!! ;-( Thanx martian!

You have to parent it to something, if i remember correctly.

And don't use 'Select Subset', or Poser won't ask if you want to save it as a smart prop.

Yes I fell foul of that one lesbentley and had to reinstall the prop and start again :-( thefixer poser coordinator

When I started using Poser it took me months to work that one out. It's surprising that it is seldom mentioned when people describe how to make a smart prop.

You don't get the option to save as a smart prop when you use subset, but sometimes you want to save 2 or more props to a single pp2 and have it operate as a smart prop. It can be done with a bit of simple file hacking.

In Poser, parent one of the props to the actor (body part), Parent the other props to the first prop, or to the same actor, save the props to a pallet using Select Subset.

Note to users of P5 and later, you may have to decompress files to follow the rest of this procedure, depending on your settings.

Open the resulting pp2 file in a text editor. Use the editors Search and Replace function to replace the string 'parent UNIVERSE' with 'smartparent NameOfParent', where "NameOfParent" is the interlal actor name, e.g. to smartparent to the right hand you would replace.

parent UNIVERSE with smartparent rHand

Note that the internal actor name is not always the same as the name that displays in the Poser interface. To see the internal actor names open a cr2 in a text editor, you should see a list of actor names near the top of the file, case is also significant here. Some of the more common actor names that you might want to smartparent to are:

hip
abdomen
chest
neck
rCollar
rShldr
rForeArm
rHand
lCollar
lShldr
lForeArm
lHand
rThigh
rShin
rFoot
lThigh
lShin
lFoot

It is not necessary to include the actor number ":#".