Has anybody else had trouble with the grouping tool in Poser 4? The manual seems pretty vauge concerning this tool so I'm hoping someone out there can help me out. My aim: I'm trying to group the chest and right and left collar of the Poser 4 male nude. I want to export into Max and fashion an amrmored breast plate. I select the chest area, hit the grouping icon, hit the new group button and name the group "chest" I then select all the polygons in the body part and that should be my 1st group, right? Ok... I do the same for both the right and left collar. When I attempt to include a group (the privious ones I made) the program doesn't even recognize that they have been created, UNLESS I click on that specific body part. Howver, I am still left with the dilema of not being able to include the OTHER groups. Sheesh, what am I doing wrong? Could somebody help me? mplsoiboi@budweiser.com Thanks.

Why not just export the parts you want without trying to group it first?

heya; i feel your pain. that grouping tool does NOT work for me, either. hey, exporting pieces sounds good. :) when you hit the obj export, uncheck the universe box (this will uncheck everything), then just mark the pieces you want. much easier. ;)

Import from the base OBJ file and delete the groups you don't want.

I may be wrong, but I think you can only group on each individual part. I don't think you can combine groups from different parts (i.e. chest and left collar). I believe the idea of the groups is to let you isolate areas of existing parts. I think...? At least that's how I've worked it. It's very clumbsy. I've only found it useful for getting rid of skin that shows through clothing (like the shins on the thigh boots)

Yeah... exporting seems to work fine, I also have just created props with the individual groups, deleted the actor (leaving the props), magnet modify a bit, then exporting. Hey, thanks for the responses.

heya; you cant group figures, props, whatever together. what you want to do is parent the arm-guy to the main figure guy. that is, select the figure, then... oh, it's in some menu somewhere, tell it to set figure parent. select the other figure, and they'll be stuck together. but only if you move the main figure; then they'll both move. if you grab the secondary figure, you might be able to move it around by itself. (that's how it works when you parent a prop to a body part, anyhow.) i guess you could try parenting them to each other, but i dont think that works.

Mist, Traveler has an excellent tutorial on "hacking limbs" at Morph World. The link is on the right.

Hmm, somehow I missed this thread. The biggest problem with the Grouping tool is it's name. It gives people the wrong Idea about what it does. It DOES NOT "Group" body parts. It's main function is to "cut apart" solid meshes and assign materials to create new figures. You import your solid mesh model, cut it into groups and materials then create a new figure with the prop spawning functions and Hierarchy Editor. Hope this clears things up. -Jeff H.