Poses for Props.

An exercise  to try to improve understanding of  poses for props.
If you are the impatient type who does not like working through exercises, you might like to skip this post and go straight to the next one "Poses for Unparented Props".

If a prop is parented to a figure, saving a pose for the figure will also save the pose for the prop. Try this exercise. Load a figure, load a box prop, place the prop on the figures head, rotate the prop 45 degrees. Parent the box to the head. Save a pose for the figure, name it "A1". Save another pose, name it "A2", but this time use "Select Subset" to exclude everything from the pose except the box. Now save the figure as "BoxHead".

Pose the figure, now 'Restore' the box (with the box selected, Ctrl+E), the box should fall from the head. Now apply the A2 pose the the figure, the box should return to the head without affecting the rest of the figure. Restore the box again, now apply the A1 pose, this time both the figure and box should return to their original pose.

We have learned that in Poser we can save a pose for the figure plus its parented prop(s), or just save a partial pose for for the parented prop(s) without including the figure. If we wanted we could also have used "Select Subset" to save a pose for the figure that did not include the prop(s).

Now load the "BoxHead" figure in the same document (scene), select its Body actor and move it slightly to the side, out of the way of the first figure. Select the box on its head and do Ctrl+E. Now apply the A2 pose, nothing happens, why?

Poser will only allow one instance of a prop named "box_1" in the document. When we loaded the "BoxHead" figure Poser changed the name of the prop to "box_2", as our pose files refer to "box_1" they will not work on "box_2". We have found a limitation on poses for props that can cause a lot of trouble if we are not aware of it.

Delete the "BoxHead" figure. Select the box on the head of the original figure and do Ctrl+E. Now unparent the box (set the parent to 'UNIVERSE"). Apply either the A1 or A2 pose, nothing happens, why?

The type of prop pose we can make in Poser only works when the prop is parented to a figure!

We can modify the poses so that they work even if the prop is not parented to a figure. Open the A2.pz2 in a text editor. change the line "prop box_1:1" to read "actor box_1", resave the file. When we address the prop as "actor" the prop does not need to be parented to a figure for the pose to work. Note well though, that a figure must be present in the document for any pp2 file to work on anything.

Q: Is there no way to pose a prop, if there is no figure in the document?

A: We can pose a prop, even if there is no figure in the document, it's just that we can't use a pz2 file to do the posing. I will explain this along with some other things, in my next post "Poses for Unparented Props".