anyone have any info on what order things are applied in poser?  i believe that it is magnet, then morph, then joint influence, then translations.  i would have thought however that joint influence would occur before the morph, since magnets occur before morphs.  i no longer think that is the case, meaning that any changes to joints will be (somewhat) unpredictable because the sheres of the joint will not relate to the original object but to the morphed object.

anyway if you all have any pointers on the subject or anything please chime in.

gracias

I don't know the answer to your question, but note that the touching edge vertices of the child part will normally be welded to the the parent part, and thus will be constrained from morphing when a morph is applied to the child.

I've seen some weird interactions between magnets and bending, which makes me wonder if bending is considered before magnets in the stack.  It seems in my experience that magnets on a posed figure don't affect the same areas as magnets on a zeroed figure.  I could be wrong, certainly.  Has anyone else noted anything to that effect (aboout magnets and order, not about my being wrong :-P)?

Regarding morphs and joint influences, morphs are ALWAYS applied to the unaltered vertices.  That is, with no consideration of joint deformations on the resulting figure.  Otherwise applied linear 3D morph deltas would be a mess or much slower as you'd have to transform the morph deltas before applying them.  Morphs before joint deformations makes logical sense then?

AFAICT, the channels are applied in the reverse order to which they appear in the file.
Hence deformers being listed last, are applied first.

I think that this mainly applies to transforms (rotate, translate, scale, propagatingScale, and offset).  Otherwise this would mean that morphs are applied last - as most targetGeoms are at the top of the channel list.  And that isn't prudent as noted - unless they are being applied to an unaltered base set like I can do in C4D.  In C4D, the transforms aren't applied to the 'real' object but to a clone so the vertices are never permanently altered by deformers and such.