How to write ERC code? Continued.
(special considerations when using ERC in conformers and pose files)

Like I said in my previous post, there are special circumstances to be considered when using slaving code in conformers, or in pose files.

When a morph channel contains slaving code that slaves it to a a rotation channel, this is called a 'JCM' (Joint Controlled Morph).

When a clothing figure is conformed to a character figure, the clothing gets its joint rotations directly from the character figure, and the rotation channels in the conformer itself remain at a value of zero. Thus if a morph in the conformer is slaved to a joint in the conformer, nothing will happen when the character is posed.

If we want to use JCM in a conformer, the JCM morphs in the conformer need to be slaved to rotations of joints in the character, not to rotations of joints in the conformer.

So how can we do that? We leave the numbers out of the slaving code so the code...

            valueOpDeltaAdd
                Figure 1
                lCollar:1
                xrot
            deltaAddDelta 0.010000

... needs to become:

            valueOpDeltaAdd
                Figure
                lCollar
                xrot
            deltaAddDelta 0.010000

If the figure number is left out of the slaving code, when the conformer is loaded, Poser will use the number from the figure that was selected at the time the conformer was loaded (eg the target character). Thus the morphs in the conformer will get their input from rotation channels in the character. This is usually known as "Super Conforming", though a better name might be "Targeted Slaving", because it has nothing to do with conforming per se. Super-conforming can also be used to express a character morph in the conformer when a character morph is expressed in the character figure.

One thing to be aware of. Whilst the conformer is sitting in the library, waiting to be conformed, it is a free spirit happy and willing to couple with any instance of a character. Once it has been loaded into a scene, it will have a figure number baked in to its slaving code, and is no longer a true super-conformer. If you save it back to a pallet, then load it into another scene, the JCM may not work correctly, because the slaving code now contains a figure number that may be different from the number in figure you are conforming it to. The only cure is to edit the saved cr2 and remove the numbers from the slaving code.

A pose file to inject slaving code (eg a Delta injection Pose) should also have the figure number removed from its slaving code, so that it uses the number from the figure it is being injected into.