The chest is touching both left and right shoulder that is parented to the chest as well as the neck.

There are no body artifacts grouped to the head.

Any corrective wisdom will be appreciated.
Pappy. 

Hi pappy411,

It appears that the vertices at the joint (head & neck) need to be "welded."

If they are properly "welded," then when "Bend Body Parts" is active there will be no "tearing."

Do you see any "tearing" at any other joints?

cheers,
dr geep
;=]

The rest of the body performs great with the bones.  No tears.  I did weld the joints and the tear still appears.
Pappy

I would have thought the same as Geep, but see this thread in which adp001 explains some joint falloff info:
http://www.renderosity.com/mod/forumpro/showthread.php?message_id=3087659&ebot_calc_page#message_3087659

Thank you!  

It is a strange situation.  I tried the neck grouping higher up and the tear occurred at the new upper  portion of the neck.  the polygons at the old tear held together and stretched well.

I sort of thiink something in the head geometry could be causing this.

sorry i came into this thread with wrong thing in mind,

this is the first time i have noticed that tear (rip) is spelt the same as tear (cry), never spotted that before,

(i probally want to stay in more)

i've been no help have i?
(hangs head in shame)

Definitely a welding issue, if I may stick my neck out here (LOL). Poser needs the vertices which are to be welded to be in exactly identical positions, down to the last decimal point. Sometimes inaccuracies in the modeller's export routines (due to Poser's titchy scale) can round the coordinates up or down. The easiest way to achieve this, by the way, is to have a continuous mesh; but some modellers think that if you want groups, they have to be separate items and they duplicate the vertices along the border. Second, there needs to be an actual weld statement in the CR2 - hand editing can sometimes lose that line of code. I hope that made sense - if not, let us know how you did the grouping and the rigging.

Hi Bob,
I think you have the answer.  I did model the head seperately from the body.  I modeled the head and body seperately then  fit and welded the head to the body in Hexagon.  There were some rogue points I missed in the head that caused the problem.

Thanks to all for the help.
Pappy

Bingo! ............. Glad you found it. ... ;=]

cheers,
dr geep
;=]

Quote - The easiest way to achieve this, by the way, is to have a continuous mesh; but some modellers think that if you want groups, they have to be separate items and they duplicate the vertices along the border.

Great point!
I have one of the modellers that does this, Hexagon. The way I get around this is to do all my rigging related grouping in UV mapper. UV mapper doesn't create the duplicate unwelded vertices, and what's rteally beautiful is that it will let you export grouping, and apply it to an ungrouped morphed mesh (of the same vertex count).
Also, for some reason I prefer to select polygon groups on a flat UV map as well.

One handy thing to do in Hex, to avoid theese kinds of tears is to occasionally run 'average weld' with a really small value. (I need to do that more often myself!)