My situation:

I've got a Poser character, I parent a smart prop and save the .cr2 as a group in Poser.

In D|S there seems to be no way to save both the character and prop together.

D|S will read my .cr2 and load both character and prop but then I have to go load the D|S mat poses for each item individualy so that the materials display correctly. 

Ideally I would like to load them both at once but the D|S Material presets (.dsa) won't include the prop.

Any ideas? Or am I missing something obvious that I haven't seen in manuals?

Thanks for any help.

Once you have the materials set in Studio, save as a Scene.

Understood except that the last time I tried that it was not accepted as a market item. I'm not sure why a scene can't be part of a store item but maybe criteria has changed.

More of a known work-around than a solution but the lack of responses suggests there is no other existing method except making the prop part of the character via rigging.

Thanks for your suggestion.

I don't understand why you would want the character to load with the prop.  Is the character and prop your own creations? 

Yes, but in the same context there are several characters out there that have clothing (chars) that load with props (attached to belts etc) in Poser. I'm sure there is a D|S equivilant I should bug them in the D|S forum at Daz, I'm just used to asking stuff here.

Thanks again.

DS sees everything in the scene as a seperate item, and will only apply a material preset to the one you've got selected .

Keeping your figure and prop(smart prop it) in seperate files (cr2 & pp2) is the best bet, as with the right coding in the DS presets you can load the cr2 and have it's material preset auto apply, same goes for a pp2.

Thanks, its good to hear I wasn't missing an obvious solution. It's good to know what I ended up doing was pretty much how its done.

My .cr2 already has the smart prop loaded to it and D|S loads that just fine. It even looks good in GL. I was looking for someway to save the user the extra step of having to go load the prop or go load the prop's material preset. But that's just how it is.

Thanks for the explanation.