Hi I want to make an Iron for ironing clothes. I want to make it in wavefront object format for use in Poser. How would you handle making the electric  cord? Considering the iron will be in wavefront .obj format.

Let me add:I know how to model the cord. What I'm wondering is how would you handle it so it could be used in Poser.

I haven't attempted a flexible cord - yet - but my approach would be to try making several short sections posable near the iron end and the plug end, with a few larger bits in between.  

I guess you could buy the Easy Pose system but I haven't a clue how that would work. 

Quote - What I'm wondering is how would you handle it so it could be used in Poser.

The obvious thing would be to rig it (or at least some sections) with "EasyPose" ERC.

I have scripts for these and also a script called draw a cord. I guess what I'm wondering is : Do I have to change the obj to a cr2 or just the cord. I guess what I'm asking is more of a packaging question than a modeling one. So sorry about that, and thank you for the replies. Any help on Packaging is welcome. Thanks again.

I would make the cord  a seperate figure and parent it to the iron.  That way you can use the iron alone or with the cord.  There are pros and cons of doing it either way.

 I've made a posable telephone cord once. It was a nightmare L

Actually, nowadays I would consider making the cord dynamic.

Could you elaborate. Or point me to some tut's?

 on making it dynamic? Well just model it as a piece of string and run a cloth simulation on it :) With the iron and the plug as constrained parts of course (or the bits of cord closest to either)

It's just an idea though so I don't actually know if it'll work. Can't see why not, though :)

It would make a nice drape from the plug to the iron. Of course, curling it up would be more tricky. Not impossible (after all I once saw a tutorial on how to wrap a dynamic towel around a figure) but.. tricky :)

Well I'm tricky but I don't think I'm that tricky. Headed for bed now. Another day tomorrow if we are lucky. Till then.....

Rigging a straight tube of polygons so that it can be bent like you describe is a very good introduction to rigging, although it's a bit tedious if you go with a lot of bones.  Once you figure out how to get one particular bone to bend the way you want it to, which isn't too hard, then you just repeat until you hit the end of the line.  I don't really recommend making it dynamic because you don't have any control over what the cord will do without A LOT of trial and error, although with luck it can give you some pretty nice results.  Setting up a single dial, or a set of dials, to bend groups of bones together and make a nice curve is actually the easy part of the job, it can be done with a CR2 editor or as others are suggesting you can use some utility like EasyPose or Poser 8+'s Dependent Parameter feature.

Start with something very simple to get a grip on how bones work - just make a plain old cylinder, with two polygon groups defined, "base" and "cord1".  Import it into Poser, go to the Setup room, and draw two bones, one for each polygon group (base and cord1).  This is best done from one of the non-orthographic cameras (top or side cameras).  Make sure that the Internal Name of each bone matches the polygon group names base and cord1. When you exit the setup room, you shouldn't get any warning message about "polygons that do not belong to a bone"- if you do, then something is probably wrong with your group names and the rig won't work.  Stop and make sure your groups are properly included in the OBJ, or at worst define them with Poser's built-in group editor; if you can get this done in your modeler I strongly recommend you do it there, because Poser's group editor is awful for this purpose.

When you get past that point with no warnings, save the new figure to the Figures library and create a new scene, load your figure, hit Ctrl+Shift+J (Joint Editor) and start fussing with joint parameters :)
http://www.tubechunk.com/video/q8jxSOL_MAM/Rigging-Figures-for-Poser-part-1-of-3-by-PhilC.html

http://www.tubechunk.com/video/PfcPu83gZNs/Poser-Joint-Parameters-part-1-of-2.html

 Or, even easier than drawing bones in the setup room (which I REALLY have never got to work the way I expected it to) is to use PHIbuilder, (scroll down a bit to download it) line up all the bits one by one, create a phi,import phi into Poser and THEN start futzing with the joint parameters.

For something like a cord, PhiBuilder is the easiest and most fool-proof way of doing it IMO.

Once you've got it to work in a reasonable manner, you can use your EZPose program on it to add the ERC.

Still, even with the proper joint parameters and ERC, something like a cord is a %&¤# to pose, because you have something static at either end (the iron and the plug) It can be done, but there's a reason why so few appliances in the Poserverse have actual cords :)

Thank you all this was very helpful.

One other thing you might consider, is to model and rig the iron and cord as one cr2/object, with the iron as the head, since the construction is linear from iron to plug.