i have just seen figure setup tools for daz studio, i haven't tried it, but by all accounts it is really good, so why is poser 8 stuck with the bloody awfull system it has? or will the tools be coming to poser?
the tools can save cr2, so i assume that means rigged figures can be used in poser, but of course you have to buy the tools and daz studio.

people can and do use the poser setup room very effectively, but i like many others i guess hate it, how can something so simple be so painfull? ,by simple i mean the basic stick the bones to the poly's, surely one bi-ped in the t-pose is essentially the same as any other, a forearm is a forearm a shin is a shin?
ok mini rant over :D

 Einzy.

I never found the Setup room to be all that badly-designed, just the bugs connected to rigging would drive me mad. 385 bones, done with the setup room:
http://www.renderosity.com/mod/gallery/index.php?image_id=1875452 (non-human "nudity", be warned)

A nice improvement in Poser 8 is that the Joint Editor now shows you 6 decimal places, instead of only 3. 

385 bones? hats of to you :D, doesn't matter what i try, as soon as i go back to the main room, the object has exploded/torn, mabe its just me.

If you take these steps:

• New, blank document
• Import OBJ
• Go to Setup room
• Draw bones with the Bone tool
• Leave Setup room

... then the object shouldn't move or be deformed at all (note that I say "shouldn't").  Do you mean when you bend some of the joints or what?

heres an example of something i tried-
v4 in C4D create a jumper using cloth, import to poser
rather than turn it into poser (slow) cloth, i want to make it a conforming figure
into the setup room- load v4 skeleton (all done with zero pose) try grouping or use auto (ha ha) delete unused bones.
return to main room, bang exploded/torn jumper.
haven't tried with p8 yet, but it all looks the same so i gave it a miss.
thats the jist of it, nothing fancy.

Use PHIBuild and you'll never have to enter the SetUp room, you can do everything with the joint editor.

what be this PHIBuild of which you speak ? :D giz a link

Google is your friend or you can download it from website downloads page:
www.DarkEdgeDesign.com

Just as a side not I have a video tutorial showing how I used PHIBuild and rigged the SpiderBot at CP.

PHI Builder is here:-
http://www.royriggs.com/poser.html

Or you can easily write your own hierarchy file by following the instructions in the Poser Manuel.

You do not need to pay any extra for Poser's set up tools since they come with the application. Yes you will need to learn how to use them but that can be said of any application. I have a number of video tutorials on my site that run through the process. Often once one is shown what to do in real time it demystifies the task considerably.

http://www.philc.net/index.php
Click the "Tutorial" menu button.

Hope that helps.

google is more of an acquaintance
cp? i did google it, no good, giz a clue :D

@pjz99
 i just did a quick  test in p8 and it worked better than before, the autogroup is no use still, but there was less tearing and strange un-moveing poly's, mabe a map of correct areas to group is about somewhere.

and thnax for the reply's aswell peeps.

Here you go Einzelganger...
www.contentparadise.com/productDetails.aspx

Yes, the SetUp room hasn't crashed on me yet in P8...much better!

thanks all, will look at tutes and see what can be done.
actually i have seen your 3 part tute phil, and was wondering how do you know what polys to group for each body part? some are obvious of course but the collar/shoulder/chest area is a pain (for me) any advice gratefully recieved.

There is no hard and fast rule, it will all depend on how you want your figure to perform. Just remember the principle that a child can affect the parent but it can not affect the grand parent.

If you want the chest area to deform when you bend the shoulder you will need to assign more of it to the collar.

Quote -  i just did a quick  test in p8 and it worked better than before, the autogroup is no use still, but there was less tearing and strange un-moveing poly's, mabe a map of correct areas to group is about somewhere.

The auto grouper is rubbish imo.  I haven't used it for anything since my very first attempts to rig anything.  If you get into the habit of planning where the bones will be as you make a model, and you use edge-looping modeling techniques, then it is usually much less difficult to make your groups by hand in the modeler if you take advantage of things like loop selection and fill selection (most modelers can do this).

You should also save the figure to the Figures library and re-load it into a blank scene after you leave the Setup room.  When you first import your model into Poser, it will be all one "solid" welded piece of geometry; when you take it into the Setup room and add bones, and then go back to the Pose room, the geometry gets split up and becomes un-welded, so when you test the bending of various joints, the mesh will show "cracks".  When you save the figure to the Figures library, a number of "weld" statements are written into the CR2 but these won't actually be run until you re-load the figure.  After you re-load it, the weld statements get executed and the figure's mesh is all one piece again, like it was before you imported it.

Quote - thanks all, will look at tutes and see what can be done.
actually i have seen your 3 part tute phil, and was wondering how do you know what polys to group for each body part? some are obvious of course but the collar/shoulder/chest area is a pain (for me) any advice gratefully recieved.

IMO the best way to get a grip on this is to just load a cylinder and set up up a pair of bones like an "elbow", and see what happens when you move the shared end point.  Experiment with this for a while and you'll get a pretty good understanding of how Poser's bends are applied.

I don't get what I'm supposed to edit in the Joint Parameters. I've watched Phil C's videos on Youtube and the, "Rigging a ponytail" and still don't understand what values I'm to edit.

What I DO know is that areas in green will move. Areas in red won't. The child can affect the Parent but not the grandparent. Meaning Shin will affect the thigh but nothing upper in the hierarchy. Other than that...what do you do?

Which boxes do you make sure to edit?

The kind of things you want to edit in Joint Editor are:

• Bulge information, where you can have the "left" and "right" sides of a joint deform a greater or smaller amount than default depending on the direction of the bend
• Falloff type; by default, a joint's deformation is applied in a set of cones, the point of which is at the joint center.  The joint deformation is 100% on within the green cone, falling off in the area between the green cone and the red cone, and 0% in the red cone.  You can instead set the falloff type to be spherical (or other types in Poser 8), and get completely different deformation applied in different ways.  This is good for situations where you have geometry that can't be made to have an isolated bend due to nearby geometry, often at the base of a "limb" (like a ponytail e.g.).

You can also numerically edit things like joint center and inclusion/exclusion zones, but those are imo a lot easier to do visually by dragging elements around in the viewport.

> Quote - The kind of things you want to edit in Joint Editor are: > - Bulge information, where you can have the "left" and "right" sides of a joint deform a greater or smaller amount than default depending on the direction of the bend > - Falloff type; by default, a joint's deformation is applied in a set of cones, the point of which is at the joint center.  The joint deformation is 100% on within the green cone, falling off in the area between the green cone and the red cone, and 0% in the red cone.  You can instead set the falloff type to be spherical (or other types in Poser 8), and get completely different deformation applied in different ways.  This is good for situations where you have geometry that can't be made to have an isolated bend due to nearby geometry, often at the base of a "limb" (like a ponytail e.g.). > > You can also numerically edit things like joint center and inclusion/exclusion zones, but those are imo a lot easier to do visually by dragging elements around in the viewport.

Mad just went shopping and got herself a brand new pair of jeans. She ran home to try them on. They ripped. (No more ice cream for her!) She wants to fix this right quick so she can show her friends her new threads, but she just doesn't understand how to! Maddie's sad. :sad: <--------see?

Still wondering what to do...

That's not bad at all :)  The thing to keep in mind with those V3/M3 type rigs is that you really need to use the buttock bone when posing along with the thigh, if you bend the thigh too much then you'll get a kink like you're seeing.  It's a limitation of Poser's rigging system; the thigh bone can bend the polys in its own group, and its parent group (buttock) but not the hip polys.  The buttock can bend its own polys, and the hip.

OMG check this out.

Poke-through. Clicked on the buttock of the PANTS. Spun....

**BAM!!!!! HOW YA LIKE ME NOW????**:woot:

Don't pose the conformed clothing, always leave the conformed item completely zeroed.  Always pose the figure, that's the point of conforming clothing.

> Quote - Don't pose the conformed clothing, always leave the conformed item completely zeroed.  Always pose the figure, that's the point of conforming clothing.

Oh.

Well then thank goodness for Photoshop. lol

That's better!