Hello,

I have taken a premade Katie rig and applied it to one of my imported .obj files.  I then selected "Auto Group".

When i go back to the Pose room and move an arm the polygons near the armpit, disconnect from the surrounding polygons.

How can i fix this? 

This is also happening with my fingers.

Please help, thanks.

Auto group is fine if your model already contains the correctly defined groups. If not then less so as you have just found. It is fixable by using the grouping tool but it is a lot of work. What I prefer to do is use UVMapper or my modeling application to define the groups prior to importing the model.

Are you able to group in UVMapper or your modeling program?

Quote - Auto group is fine if your model already contains the correctly defined groups. If not then less so as you have just found. It is fixable by using the grouping tool but it is a lot of work. What I prefer to do is use UVMapper or my modeling application to define the groups prior to importing the model.

Are you able to group in UVMapper or your modeling program?

Yes i am using cinema4d so i can setup UV coordinates that way.  How would i go about setting up the UV's so that Poser can use them to setup groups?

Quote - > Quote - Auto group is fine if your model already contains the correctly defined groups. If not then less so as you have just found. It is fixable by using the grouping tool but it is a lot of work. What I prefer to do is use UVMapper or my modeling application to define the groups prior to importing the model.

Are you able to group in UVMapper or your modeling program?

Yes i am using cinema4d so i can setup UV coordinates that way.  How would i go about setting up the UV's so that Poser can use them to setup groups?

I also have UVMapper.  Would that be easier than cinema 4d?

You need to be able to select polygons and assign them to groups. I do not have cinema so can not comment, UVMapper does however save the object in a format that is compatible with Poser.

UV mapping though part of the overall model creation process is not part of the grouping/rigging task.

Ok once i figure out how to assign bodypart UV's to groups then how do i setup the bones in Poser to use those groups?

I looked through the grouping tool dialogue and i don't see anything that does this.

Or is it the AutoGroup that takes the UV groups into account?

Please distinguish between groups dividing the meshs polygons and the uv-groups. The latter are texture related. "Grouping" for Poser means splitting your geometry into parts.

Ok what i am in need of is this.  I imported a .obj character and i used the Katie premade rig in the setup room.  I positioned the Katie rig's bones to line up with my character's bones.

So know i need to assign the bones so that they will deform the appropriate neighboring geometry.

How do i do this?

If the bone is named identically to the group it will be assigned automatically. There will be no need to click the auto group button, simply return to the Pose Room.

Could you please explain what you mean by lining up the Katie bones with the character bones.

Sorry that was a typo.  What i meant was that i imported the Katie rig and positioned those bones to line up within my mesh.

So while in the setup room i aligned the Katie bones inside my .obj file so that everything lines up.  the finger bones line up where the fingers are on the mesh, and the hip bones line up with the hips of the mesh. 

The mesh is all one object.  I want to bind the bones to the mesh. 

There are two types of 'group' on a Wavefront OBJ mesh - one is for grouping polygons, the other for texturing them.  In the OBJ file, these groups are denoted by 'g name' and 'usemtl name'.  The set that is important to Poser for rigging is the 'g' groups.  The problem with Cinema 4D is that its default Wavefront exporter will only save g groups on export if each group is represented by an individual object.  There is a solution to this - use a single PolygonObject with Polygon Selection tags, each representing a g group, and then use the Riptide plugin to export as Wavefront OBJ with appropriate settings.

For a humanoid figure, become acquainted with Poser's internal naming scheme for bodyparts (g groups).  That is: hip, abdomen, chest, lThigh, rThigh, rCollar, lForeArm, rFoot, etc.  This will make rigging much easier (i.e.: allow automatic bone assignment).

It is far easier to group in another application than in the Poser Setup Room.  UV Mapper can indeed be used to set up 'g' groups as well as 'usemtl' groups (materials).

Awesome thank you very much this is exactly what i needed to know