I have this great river cottage with a nice fireplace and it would be nice if there was an easy way to place people in front of the fireplace. It is kind of a pain to load people into the scene-then try to find them and then try to drag them from the outside deck or somewhere to where they belong in the scene. There is probably an easier way, can you help me.

Thanks

Do you know the X and Z tran of the fireplace or whatever?   Match the loaded figure's settings to those.  

Make the roof invisible if there is one.

Use the top camera. Grab your figure and just drag it.

Thanks DPHoadley for teaching me this.

It would be nice if creators of props included some poses to position figures in a room to start with, but that wouldn't teach you how to do it yourself. My suggestion is move them yourself as suggested above and then save a loading pose for whichever room you want to be able to load future figures to.

Just my take on stuff: I tend to have everything in the house parented to the house, then move the house under the figure. That way you don't have to mess with camera and lighting adjustment and all that.

Again: just my take.

If there's no separate roof, I'd try changing the display style for the house to wireframe.

*"It would be nice if creators of props included some poses to position figures in a room to start with..." *

Very true, at least some likely ones, sitting on the sofa, lying in bed, in the doghouse for when Mike pisses off Vickie.* *

i do as robyn does, drag the prop, IMHO its not the figure thats misplaced its the prop... the prop should be centered in the 'world' ...unless of course its part of a larger environment.

:O)

NanetteTredoux's suggestion is a good one, as is RobynsVeil's. Apart from that, when positioning a figure you should do it by translating the BODY actor not the hip actor. The reason is that if you translate the hip, applying a pose will probably move the figure to a different part of the scene. Once you have one figure positioned you can read the coordinates for the BODY from the parameters palette, so you can apply the same coordinates to any other figures.

If you have a lot of figures that you want to move all at once, you can parent them to a Poser primitive, translate the primitive, then hide the primitive.

I sometimes increase the figure size eg to 500% so I can see it easily even thru the roof, and then I just drag it approximately and gradually shrink it down looking from top camera, and then to the posing cam, and then to the main cam which will be taking the photo.

Love esther

Lots of good ideas! Thanks, that is very helpful.

Lance

also I use advanced figure manager.  It's a python script from rdna, and you can move say two people or people and a table etc, very quickly and easily.

You can also parent everything to one thing in seconds and drag the thing eg an invisible ball around the place.

Python scripts have made my poser life so much easier over the last 12 months than it ever was before.

By the way when I move lights around them I make the huge as well and change display style for the light to textured, and that makes it much easier to find and position the light too.

Love esther

Quote - By the way when I move lights around them I make them huge   as well and change display style for the light to textured, and that makes it much easier to find and position the light too. Love esther

As do I, Esther: great trick. Doesn't appear to affect the light in terms of luminosity to the scene at all.

Oh yes, I should have mentioned that.

Did I mention that when you shift-click in advanced figure manager you can select a whole batch of things in less than a second (unlike when you do it in the heirachy editor), and then you just right click to say move them or delete them, make them all invisible etc.

Love esther