Let me explain more thoroughly and with an example.  As B L Render's book states, CATP (Children Affect Their Parents).  But does this extend to grandparents and so on?  Here is the prime example: Young Teen Luke's "School's In" Tie.

The hierarchy looks like this:

BODY
    Chest
        Neck
        Knot
            Tie01
                Tie02
                    ...

If you look at the points on the mesh, the Chest and Tie01 bodyparts share a set of points.  But the Chest is not the parent of Tie01 (Knot is) and there are no AddChild or Weld statements between the two.  Because of this, what I get in my plugin is overdeformation since the object resides as a single polygonal mesh and the 'bends' are applied doubly to the shared points on Chest and Tie01 because of this (parent points are handled differently when deforming to avoid this).  The modeling here to handle the area around the knot doesn't happen often, but it is still a case that should be handled.

Would it be going too far (and maybe into other areas that could cause problems) to not only consider the parent, but also other anscestors for the deformations?

Thanks,

Robert

P.S.: I have no idea how Poser stores bodypart points internally or applies its deformations.

I don't have the Book to hand at the moment, but I'm fairly sure the full quote is to the effect that "children affect their parents, but not their grandparents". So in Poser, Tie01 would affect Knot, but not Neck or Chest (sorry about the homophones). My experience is that this is regardless of shared but unwelded points, although I don't have the item you quoted. I believe that Poser splits a figure mesh into separate meshes internally, one for each body part, even if the original is all one piece; so the weld statements are essential to define what parts are going to stay together when moved. If you use a one-piece mesh, but omit the weld statements from the CR2, it will split when bent just as if it were made from separate pieces.

This is basically my point (no pun).  And I sort of figured that each bodypart stored its own points - same happens for morphs I think.

Thing is that my plugin is running in Cinema 4D, so none of the default Poser stuff is available to help me. :)  Poser may store the bodypart points separately and weld them as needed for bendy bends, but I must store them together, welded, and avoid this overdeformation.

After thinking it over for the past couple hours, it appears that I will need to consider the ancestors in setting up the weighting (i.e.: set point weights that belong to the bodypart and ancestors, excluding whatever weighting involves the parent, to 0.0 for the bodypart) so that this 'jump over' deformation cannot occur.

Basically, how Poser works explicitly, my plugin must do implicitly.  Off I go...

Robert