been working extensively with the joints ot these characters and making my own...seems that the horrible deformations we face when we pose our characters could be taken out with this.  i can make the matspheres work perfectly for whatever angle i need...but you can't animate it so far as i know, which just means stills.  that's no fun...so any one seen anything like this?

ps. if the software creators ever check in here, this would be a really really great feature.  it would expand our realism and animation capacity by leaps and bounds and make dynamic cloth actually reliable.  after all, once you get the joint parameters down, no polys need to collide again. 

mcm, jcm, erm - these are just a few of the tech acronyms for controlling the bad joints that poser is currently stuck with. maybe in P7 they'll be better somehow. in the meantime, trying to incorporate those details into a poser animation will probably require an extra team of 5 guys just to handle poser JPs, assuming yer trying to use poser to render a commercially-acceptable animation under a realistic deadline, which is not something I've seen from anyone at this site yet.

yeah i am messing with the morphing side of it...but it's such a shame when all you gotta do is slide the zone around and everything comes out nice and smooth.

if you ask me, the rotation of the joints, the areas of effect, should have a sort of off center setting, so that you are not rotating around a point but more around a ball. (adjustable of course.)  the zones seem to try that in a way, by moving the green zone away from the center joint.   well okay i guess that would be that.  eh.  still would like to see it animatable though

we shall see if the new bone/rigging system in P7 is up-to-date. it may well involve non-spherical zones, bone-weighting, and it may well include jcms for everything. of course, one can already use some kinda trick to change the zone shape, but regardless of its apparent shape, in pre-p7 versions, the zone always acts in a spherical influence. that's the great thing about cargo-cult-coding - the expectant users waiting breathlessly for all the wonderful and amazing ways that the new software fixes the old stumbling blocks.

well that answers that question.  i had tried to change the shape of the zone and couldn't find a way.  but you say that the influence will be spherical anyway.  doh.

i'm just gonna brute force apply magnets to create morphs i guess.  magnets give some flexibility i guess, just you have to use so many to be smooth and to get the shape just right.

so what was the shape changing technique for zones?  i tried exporting as obj, didn't take.  tried putting a magnet on zone, wouldn't take

yeah, ya can change the zone to look like a cube or cone or whatever. but it just looks like a cube or cylinder. it still influences the joint in a spherical zone. IIRC it's

sphereZoneProp Mag Zone 2:1
        {
        storageOffset 0 0.3487 0
        objFileGeom 0 0 :Runtime:geometries:props:ball.obj
        }

and ya change it to some other prop. not that it matters. at least not until we get poser 7.

Magnets are what you need to use.

Your question got me interested, so I decided to do a little experimentation. Unfortunately you can't (as far as I know) animate the MatSpheres (plural). You can animate one MatSphere as long as you are prepaired to leave the Joint Editor open, but one does not sound like it would be much use to you. Never the less, out of academic intrest here is how to animate one MatSphere. Using a text editor create a valuParm channel in the BODY actor, eg:

           valueParm InnerMAT X
                        {
                        name InnerMAT X
                        initValue 0
                        hidden 0
                        forceLimits 0
                        min -100000
                        max 100000
                        trackingScale 0.001
                        keys
                                {
                                static  0
                                k  0  0
                                }
                        interpStyleLocked 0
                        }

Or you can use an existing valuParm if the figure contains spare ones you dont need to use for other purposes. Next you need to create a pz2 to inject slaving code into the figure: {

version
        {
        number 4.01
        }

actor innerMatSphere
        {
        channels
                {
                translateX xtran
                        {
                        valueOpDeltaAdd
                                _NO_FIG_
                                BODY
                                InnerMAT X
                        deltaAddDelta 1.000000
                        }
                }
        }
figure
        {
        }
}

In Poser, load the figure, select the actor you want to animate, open the Joint editor, select the paramiter, select the matSphere, apply the pz2. You can now select the BODY and enter diffrent values for the InnerMAT X dial in each frame of the animation. Running the animation will cause the innerMatSphere to respond to changes in the master InnerMAT X channel, providing that the Joint editor is kept open throughout the whole operation. It seems (and this is just supposition, but seems to be borne out by my experiments) that when the Joint Editor is open and an innerMatSphere selected, that Poser creates a tempory actor "actor innerMatSphere", and this actor is suseptable to ERC controle the same as any other actor, but as soon as the Joint Editor is closed the tempory actor disapears. Because only one innerMatSphere actor can exist at one time, and this actor is somehow associated with the currently selected actor, only one innerMatSphere can be animated. It's yet to be seen if both the inner and outer sphers can be annimated at the same time. In the above example only xTran was animated, but it should be posible to animate any and all of the MatSpheres translate, rotate and scale channels, but only for the currently selected actor, and only whilst the Joint Editor is open. Like I said, none of this is likely to be of more than academic interest to you, but then who knows, it may help someone somewhere down the line with a diffrent problem. P.S. The experiments were done in P4.

Poser only has one of inner and outer sphere props, which are reused for each joint when editing.
If you want something permanent with the same affect, you'll need to setup magnets.

: em bows before lesbently
holy cow man that is cool.  i've just gotten to the point where i know what you are talking about.  nice, nice work around.  and you know, not such a chore to keep the joint editor open.