Some products come with their parameter groups a mess. Some have many empty groups and morphs unnecessarily buried many levels deep. Some parameters are grouped in an illogical, disordered manner (such as some standard FBMs in "Other".

Some vendors are conscientious about uncluttering their products before releasing them, others aren't.  I'm sort of compulsive about not having messy parameter structures.

Is there a quicker way to clean them up without going through each body part and repeating the process of rearranging / deleting parameter groups? Is there a script or something that makes this less tedious?

You're talking about like down to the fingers?  Yikes that's a lot of editing, no I don't know of any tool to make that less of a massive job.  While I give the same dial grouping on the Body that the character has for all garments, I'm not too motivated to do that for all 50 body parts.  If there's a tool out there that is aimed at managing groups and streamlining what you're talking about I've never heard of it.

No, even I am not anal enough to worry about each each finger (with 3 joints each) and toe! That's 40 parts right there.

But Hip, Abdomen, Chest, Neck, Head, 2 collars, 2 shoulders, 2 forearms, 2 hands, 2 thighs, 2 shins and 2 feet are 19 body parts. It can get pretty tedious cleaning up sloppy structures.

Some vendors don't bother to remove unneeded body parts before shipping their products. So you find a sock, for example, that has all the upper torso parts included.  Or a hat that has legs, feet and toes. Each part with a full set of empty groups, right down to the Community and Daz groups. These vendors drive me crazy.

I assumed there must be some utility or script that (some) vendors use to clean up, delete and hide unneeded groups and parameters. Such vendors get my repeat business!

PhilC's Pocketknife includes scripts for deleting and hiding morphs for an entire figure in one pass, but they don't affect the groups that hold the morphs. 

imax...have you ever tried Pose Magic products?  Everything you could need in posing is on one parameter list...ONE.  I've carefully grouped everything in a logical manner, but it would be a heck of a lot easier for you to group to your liking AND, on the further-up side, you'll have even more control of joint posing than you would by going to each individual body part.

Quote - But Hip, Abdomen, Chest, Neck, Head, 2 collars, 2 shoulders, 2 forearms, 2 hands, 2 thighs, 2 shins and 2 feet are 19 body parts. It can get pretty tedious cleaning up sloppy structures.

No, there's no spiffy automation that will automatically set up this kind of thing, not without needing its own kind of labor to set it up and make sure it doesn't break anything else in the process.  Please keep in mind that your particular preferences for how these things should be displayed and ordered probably doesn't match anyone else's either.

Note most vendors won't come straight out and tell you this.

Quote - imax...have you ever tried Pose Magic products?  Everything you could need in posing is on one parameter list...ONE.  I've carefully grouped everything in a logical manner, but it would be a heck of a lot easier for you to group to your liking AND, on the further-up side, you'll have even more control of joint posing than you would by going to each individual body part.

I've looked at the new Pose Magic Pro that just came out. Amazingly, it is a Poser add-on, not a separate app that is restricted to PC only. (Vendors of such tools should realize that Macs play a signfiicant role in the 3D and creative universes, much more so than the business world).

At first glance it looks like a great tool for posing, though perhaps slightly pricey at $26 here at Rendo. They seem proud of the fact that they used it to pose a woman and baby in a fairly simple position in 6 minutes, which didn't seem all that impressive to me (but I'm somewhat facile at posing with Poser's standard methods, and it did take awhile to get to that level)

Still, I'd probably buy it if it did the things I'm talking about. It is not evident from its description that it can. Are you sure  that it manages / rearranges / deletes parameters and groups, not just poses the figure?

Quote - > Quote - Please keep in mind that your particular preferences for how these things should be displayed and ordered probably doesn't match anyone else's either.

No, I realize this. I'm not looking for an ultra-simple tool that performs one universal task on groups and does it the same way every time. It would need to have options to be tweaked to allow for individual needs and wildly varying group structures presented by different vendors.

I would not be surprised if such a thing did not exist, but perhaps some snazzy scripter will see this, think "Hey, that IS a pain in the a$$)  and take up the challenge.

Imax - first, disclosure - I am the Vendor of Pose Magic.

Second - it doesn't do what you want it to do automatically.  Instead, Every possible posing dial is on one parameter pallette, instead of (or in addition to) being spread out on nearly 50 different body parts.

So, you've got one master list, very carefully arranged in (already) logical groups.  Every dial is there, the main benefit being you don't have to move off this palette to pose your figure.

As to your particular problem, what you'd do is decide whether you like the grouped arrangements or you could move things around.  You'd only have one list to work with, instead of 50-ish, and in that there'd be no redundancy.

Further, you'd have a lot of extra posing controls you don't have on the figure itself.  For example, instead of bending the left leg and then bending the right, you can bend both legs with one dial.  You can then go assymetric by using the Legs Split dial, which bends one forward and one backward at the same time.

It may very well work on a Mac, and it should, but I don't have a Mac, nor do I plan on getting one ;)

Thanks for the disclosure! Nothing like unwittingly making little criticisms without much foundation to the person who created the thing. :)  

I see what you're saying... Ignore the mess in Poser's parameters panel and do all posing tasks from within Poser Magic. I wonder if you even need the parameters panel open in that case?

Can Poser Magic auto-load when Poser starts up? So many useful Poser tools have no ability to do this, when it seems (to the layman) to be a simple thing to include. There I go again, talking without knowing what I'm talking about.

If its a universal python script it should work on Mac. I have to think about spending $26 to find out. I am very tempted, because I could find such a tool very useful. The Poser parameter panel is the bane of my existence.

Don't worry about criticisms...I'm fully confident that if you tried the product all criticism would go right out the window :D

Pose Magic is a non-rendering PP2.  You load the prop, it attaches itself to your figure, then you inject the pose magic code into the figure.  There would be no way to have it auto-load, except for this...don't you tend to get your figure ready and save it as a pz2 you use to open poser directly?  That's how I work, at least...I've got my favorite character saved at a baseline with all my preferred settings and options etc and use that Pz3 to load poser.  In this scenario, you would already have PoseMagic loaded whenever you open your pz3.

Since it is a prop (so to speak) you would still be using the parameter panel.

Since it is a prop and a pose it should work on a Mac, as long as that mac is running Poser 8 or Poser Pro 2010.

There is a python script included that turns PoseMagic settings into regular pz2 files.

I will check the archives and see if previous PoseMagic editions have worked on a mac (I honestly can't remember)

 Well, PoserFile Editor by D3D can do a lot of what you want, with one click. It has a Repair category that is GREAT for cleaning up groups. 

If I understand your question right, this may be what you need :) Plus it's a nice tool for a lot of other things as well :)

Attached Link: PoserFile Editor

D3D has many wonderful tools I'd like to buy, but most of them (like Poser File Editor) are separate apps that run only in Windows. As a Mac user, I'm confined to tools that run inside Poser itself, such as python scripts or William's prop-loaded Pose Magic.

Imax - By all accounts, all previous versions worked just fine on Mac!

Ah, I see you've bought it.  Let me know if it's helping you with your situation?  Thanks!