Greetings!!

So for my latest endeavour I'm working on a cooler 'prop'.  My question is, I would like for the lid to open/close, the handle to telescope and for the wheels to rotate.  To achieve all this for one prop is my best bet to make it a figure and rig it to do all these functions, or is there a way to stack morph targets appropriately, and how would I go about doing this??  =]

Thanks,

Andy!! =D

My suggestion is to make it a figure.

I agree with Phil.  It's really simple to do for a hard surface model such as this.  You could have it fully rigged and all the joints set properly in about 10 minutes and you won't even need to visit the Setup Room.

Of course, if you already know this, I apologize if I'm teaching my Grandma to suck eggs. 

it looks nice.

Looks good

One thing I noticed... if the circles on the top of the lid are the diameter of the base of an average soda pop bottle, then it should maybe be taller?

If it's one for cans of beer / coke etc. then its cool

Sorry, I'm actually, surely going off topic into the realms of product design here more than prop modelling as it's probably based on a real world object?

But anyway, a set of morphs to adjust the dimensions, e.g. height, would be well cool, perhaps? If you could figure that out...

I don't know if Bagginsbill has published a good plastic shader tutorial anywhere... or if we'll get some more plastic materials in a future release from him and Dreamland... but I do think a good set of shaders for different plastics are maybe missing at present??

Attached Link: A larger render can be viewed here.

Thanks for the replies, I reckon I'll fiddle around with it as a figure.  I'll probably go ahead and set the handle as a morph target, then rig the wheels to rotate and the lid to open/close, shouldn't be too difficult.  Hopefully =P. 

I actually based the model off a Coleman Xtreme 50-quart wheeled cooler.  I measured most of the standard shapes and kind of winged the rest. =]  The can holders are designed for a basic 12oz can, though I do plan to include can, beer bottle and soda bottle props with the cooler, just gotta be careful if you have a bottle in there. =P

Coleman also has a 75-quart cooler of the same product line that I'm sure I could easily make a morph for to adjust the size.  I'm still learning my way around creation for Poser and not sure how I would tackle the textures for that, for I'm sure I'd run into stretching issues.

The current renders are quick shots out of Maya, so I haven't set it up in Poser yet.  I do intend to make detailed textures for it as well tweak the shaders to give it a plastic apperance.  I still have a little more modeling/mesh tweaking to accomplish then UVs. 

I'm most certainly open to any suggestions or critiques anyone might have!!  I was thinking of making it a part of a tail-gate pack so if anyone can thing of something that they think would go well with it please let me know. =]

Also here's some ortho renders to give a better sense of propotions. 

Telescoping the handle can be a morph. The wheel rotation and lid opening need to  be done in a figure. Morphs are applied in a straight path between the start and end positions of the morph, no rotations allowed.  So if you morph the lid open and closed the positions between (partlyopen will look odd.

You can use a phi file and get Poser to do some of the work to make the figure, or load the parts and use the heirarchy editor.

Very nice cooler

Yeah, Bagginsbill has been discussing "Morphing Props" in a recent thread and is using a script... some sort of procedural geometry generation to rewrite the UVs after a prop is morphed into a new proportion / shape... at least that's how I understand it.

Anyway, he's figured out a dynamic way to avoid the texture stretching you mention... I believe. But he's not published a way for others to use his technique there, as yet.

Otherwise it looks great, as a model of that Coleman cooler... does indeed look spot on to me

The telescoping handle can easily be done if its modeled the same as a real life one, and then you have no texture stretching.

Quote - To achieve all this for one prop is my best bet to make it a figure and rig it to do all these functions, or is there a way to stack morph targets appropriately, and how would I go about doing this??  =]

Rotations of the wheels and lid must be implemented as transforms, not morphs. Morphs can't do rotations, they can only move vertices in straight lines, so you have no choice on that score. In theory you could use stacked morphs and ERC to approximate a rotation, but in praxis muman life is too short to make this a practicable option.

Whether you use morphs or transforms has no bearing on whether you implement it as a figure or a prop. The only reason that is likely to absolutely mandate implementation as a figure is if you needed bending as well as rotations. That said, implementing an articulated model as a figure does have some advantages over a prop. A figure can have a BODY actor, and that is a great advantage in fighting gambol lock. A figure can be deleted in one operation, where as, an articulated prop needs to be deleted one part at a time. Materials are easier to handle in a figure, as they are stored in one central location, and an mc6 can affect every material in a figure at once. The Poser interface can save poses for a figure, you can only save poses for a prop if it is parented to a figure.