Decided to plunge into ye olde waters of the setup room with Dr. Geep's wonderful tutorial.  After doing the square thing, I did the cube routine.  Importing three cubes from the primitive section.  Found it pretty hard to get all the mesh of each cube selected since the bottom of one is covered by the top of an other one.  So I placed them away from each other before exporting them as an .obj for importing back in.  More or less successful in getting each bone linked to a given cube.  Only problem I have now is that when I rotate each one, they look as if they are all being drawn into a black hole, the youngest child being stretched the most etc.

Got to look at Dr Geep's treatment of how he handles fingers--next project spheres.  Jan

For a long time, I was thinking "why would I want to mess around with the setup room, I have no intention of modifying Judy, she's perdy enough with some face and figure morphing.

Now, I'm finding that one can make simple things in the setup room as add on's for Judy (to perdy her up eg necklaces.  Yes, there is a superb necklace in the freebies section and that necklace got me thinking.  Plutom

Sorry, can't help you with that stuff. I can't even make a simple chain in the setup room so have resigned myself to the fact that some of us IE: Me, are just not cut out for modeling 3D stuff.

If the setup room is giving ya problems look into using the heirarchy editor to set the parent-child relationships and create the figure. or check out phi builder. It does mean you have to seperate the geometry in the modeller but thats not that hard to do.

Hi Markschum,  using the hierachy editor to set parent-child relationships is a good idea.  Already using it to check to see what's happening in the setup room.  Thanks -- Plutom

Acadia, I'm beginning to get that feeling too, so I'm asking for help.

Hi gang, well I now ran smack dab into a minor problem.

As you know that in the Setup room, one must link bone with a given portion of the object.  To do that one must give a name, then identify which portion of the object to group.  In my case, I’ve got eight spheres with cylinders sticking out of them (sphere is the pearl and cylinder is the link between that  sphere and the next sphere).

What I have been doing is “painting” the entire sphere by rotating it and  “paint” what is seen, rotate again, repeat the “paint” etc then do a complete inspection to ensure that all the polygons are “painted”.  If everything goes correctly and linked with a bone, I can rotate it any which way and I’m not going to have bits and pieces left behind because I missed “painting” that portion of the sphere.

Now  this is a miserable time consuming thing to do.  If one is working on an extremely complex animal form, its surprising that anyone would have the patience and attention to detail necessary accomplish the feat.  

Now my question.  Is there a quicker way to “paint” all portions of one sphere so that all portions are identified and that there are no pieces left behind when I rotate it?

“Paint” my term for selecting all the polygons of my sphere.   Plutom

you have come across one of the achiles heels of poser figure creation. frankly the only shortcut that works is not to use poser for grouping at all, which is what almost all merchants have done. if you have a modeler that can do .obj grouping I would use that, or UVMapper can do it, or Autogroup editor availible here. as for selecting backside polygons at the same time as you select frontside in the grouping tool you can change over to wireframe view and both front and back polys will be selected.

Thanks, I do have UVmapper-wireframe!--Okay, I'll give it a try tomorrow--again thanks for the tips--Plutom

Hi Pluton.

I'm not much of a user of the set-up room myself, but I think I can help a little here with the grouping ...

Before exporting your "Pearl+Link", (and before gong anywhere near the Setup Room) select the sphere, open the grouping editor and you should see the whole sphere selected (all red) If not hit "Add All". Now hit "Assign Material" (down in the Geometry Functions section) and give the mat a name. Do the same for the cylinder. (Ignore the wierd, random default colours that get assigned.) Now you can export/import.
(Why do this? Because it creates material groups for each part - you can see them in the Materials room. And .obj format suppurts material groups so they will survive the export/import process.)

Enter the setup-room. Now when grouping you can hit "Add Material", select from the drop-down list and that bit will be added...

Cheers,
Diolma

(who's hoping he's got the right end of the stick..)

all except doing the grouping in the setup room, avoid doing grouping in the setup room at all costs, as there is a bug which causes groups to be mangled after saving a cr2 when grouping is done in there, instead do the grouping in the pose room.

Hi Wdupre, yep,  I sort of found out about  the mangling part  this morning--it was a perdy abstract painting, had the neatest design that in no way resembled a sphere or a cylinder.  I thought it was another SOE

Thanks for the tip Diolma,  I'll do it--when I get back to the setup room, I need to do something else for a few days to let everything sink in.

Again, thanks folks--Plutom