dhouck opened this issue on Feb 20, 2010 · 27 posts
nomuse posted Sat, 20 February 2010 at 3:28 PM
I'd use the file with separate objs, as I think it would be difficult to slice that stove from within Poser.
The best way to slice within Poser, if you have to, is by using the Grouping Tool (one of the round buttons in the posing room). There is an auto-group function in the Setup Room but it will give you no joy.
My process usually starts with an object file that has internal groups already. My first step for a simple figure such as you have above is;
Select the Grouping Tool and "spawn props," then delete the original from the workspace. This creates individual objects from each group within your imported object. You want one actual object for every part that needs to move (there is an exception to this for organics, but anyhow!)
Go into the Hierarchy editor, and drop parts on top of parts. In the case of your stove above, all the moving parts are children of the stove itself. If, say, there were knobs that turned on the front of drawers that slid, those knobs would be children of the drawers which would be children of the stove.
Select the base object (still in the Hierarchy editor) and click "Create Figure."
At this point it is safer to quit Poser, then restart, navigate to the root folder, and you will find your new figure in "New Figures." Interestingly enough, as of Poser Six, the next time you save the figure Poser will remote the geometry for you (although it will put it in the character folder right beside the cr2).
Select the Joint Editor tool. Switch to orthographic views (top down, side, front, etc.) Turn the view to wireframe. This makes it easiest to go through and drag the joint centers where you need them to be. The essential part here is making sure you move the joint centers to the hinges of the doors.
Turn off bending on all parts. For a non-organic figure, this is sufficient to get a clean joint (for an organic figure, like a clothing item, your work would just be starting now!)
Dial each part as far as it should go, make a note of the dial reading, then go into the dial by double-clicking on the dial itself and set limits. You can also adjust the dial sensitivity and re-name the dial to something like "open" if you wish.
a) Save the cr2. Now exit Poser, fire up a text editor, and navigate to the cr2 you saved. Scroll down past the geometry and actor definitions to where the actors are. For each of these, you will see an entry like "Actor top_drawer:1" That's the section that controls the part you want to slide. Under that entry will be a stack of channels. Look for the three channels called "xtran," "ytran," and "ztran." Under THOSE are several entries, with the entry "hidden 1" close to the top. Change that to "hidden 0."
Save the cr2, go back to Poser, load the figure back into the workspace. Now you can use the dials, rename them, set their limits etc.
Really, this sounds more complicated than it is. Once you've looked inside a cr2 a few times it won't scare you too much to go hunting. Oh, and there are much better examples than what I gave above...with samples of actual cr2 as examples. I just don't have the patience this morning to find them, or to hand-type a full cr2 excerpt here. Go look for Doctor Geep's tutorials. They'll have everything.
b) There is at least one third-party tool, PhilC's "Poser Pocket Knife" which will hide and unhide dials from the Poser workspace via a Python script.
Anyhow, that's the basics.