Forum: Poser - OFFICIAL


Subject: A Compendium of PZ2 Techniques.

lesbentley opened this issue on Mar 31, 2008 · 137 posts


lesbentley posted Mon, 31 March 2008 at 11:54 PM

**Poses for Unparented Props.**I have called this post "Poses for Unparented Props", but the pose file in this post will also work on a parented prop, as will almost all poses constructed for unparented props.

As we saw in my last post, poses made in Poser won't work on props that are not parented to a figure.

If we want to pose unparented props we have to make a slight change from the syntax that Poser uses to save a pose. Instead of addressing "prop PropName_1", we need to address the prop as "actor", e.g. "actor PropName_1".

Below is an example of a pz2 that will pose an unparented prop named "ball_1" (the first instance loaded of a Poser Ball primitive). Remember there needs to be a figure in the document before this will work, even though the prop does not need to be parented to the figure.

Pose for an Unparented Ball Prop:

{

version
        {
        number 3
        }

actor ball_1
        {
        storageOffset 0 0.3487 0
        objFileGeom 0 0 :Runtime:Geometries:props:box.obj
        }

actor ball_1
        {
        channels
                {
                rotateY yrot
                        {
                        keys
                                {
                                k  0  45
                                }
                        }
                scale scale
                        {
                        keys
                                {
                                k  0  1.5
                                }
                        }
                }
        material Preview
                {
                KdColor 1 0 0 1 
                }
        }
}

The above pz2 file will make a number of changes to the Ball prop. First it will inject the Box geometry, turning the ball into a box, it will yRotate the prop 45º, it will scale the prop to 150%, and finally it will change the defuse color to red. - - - - - -

**Pose a prop when no figure in the scene.**Q: OK, we now know how to pose an unparented prop, but we still need a figure in the scene. Can we delete the figure and still be able to pose the prop?

A: We can pose a prop when there is no figure in the scene, we just can't use a pz2 file to do it, no pz2 file will work without a figure present.

To pose a prop without a figure present, we can save our pose file to a camera folder, and give it a cm2  file extension. Cm2 files to not need a figure present in order to work, most pose files for props (all the ones I have tried so far) will work from a camera folder if you give them a cm2 file extension. Try it, take the pose file above and save it as a cm2.

In my next post I will adress some uses of "actor $CURRENT" and give some more examples of poses that can be used on props.