Quote - ok all you poser professionals I need a little help. I have this prop I am working on and want to turn it into a figure. The prop is made up of many individual pieces. I put this in because I'm not sure if it's gonna make a difference latter. Here's the problem, I have been offered a lot of advice and even been pointed to tutorials to help me out which I am greatful for, but I can't seem to put the training into a working item. these are the steps I have been following:

1- with prop still in modeling program, assign groups, (i.e. rHand, rIThumb1, rThumb2 ect)

2- load into UV Mapper and check groups

3- import into Poser7 as a prop. check group names in group editor. Do not use group editor to set groups as it is not effective and causes trouble.(this was told to me)

4- send to Setup room and create Bones with the Bone tool. Name the bones so that they match the internal name of the grouped material. Use the Joint editor to position the bones and remove any static bones.

So far good. What do you mean by "remove any static bones"? Normally you will need all bones, even if they are not supposed to move, because otherwise Poser will not load the geometry for the associated group.

Quote - 5- send back to Pose room. If all groups and polys are correct this will occure without issue. test new figure for joint acuracey and adjust as needed.

If these steps are correct and I would assume they are why do I get this (see image) When I moved the rThumb1 the shaft of the piston didn't stay connected to the rThumb1 group. The textures didn't apply either. It's not the processor in my system, I have a quad core. This is getting anoying. I tried with a simple prop worm and even it was buggered up. any help would be greatly accepted. maybe a step by step written out for me to follow. I use wings to model with, UV mapper for the map and Poser7 for the system.

Is the piston a child of rthumb1? If not, it will not move. Not sure if i interpret your image correctly, but if you are trying to create some kind of hydraulic piston, that always points in a straight line to its connectors, you will need to use "PointAt" or IK to accomplish that. If that is what you want, you should search the forums for "rigging piston", there are several posts for this subject. In any case, you will need a separate bone for the piston. Try to rig it in such a way that it can be moved manually into the right position (via using the dials), and when it basically works, add the automatic movement later.

I do not know what it is with the textures, but try to export the object as an obj file, to see if it has still uv coordinates and materials after the whole process. If not, it is usually not a problem. After using the setup room and saving the figure as a cr2 file, poser saves a new version of the obj file along with it, sometimes containing errors. I normally throw that one away and overwrite it with the original instead.