I'm part way through rigging a skirt for V4 that I created in blender and have encountered an issue that is baffling me on the setting up of joints, so I'm wondering if those of you out there with experience in this area might have any pointers.

The skirt uses additional bones that are parented to the hip for a series of separate panels and the majority of these seem to work fine. However, some do not - despite being outside the green inner mat sphere (using spherical zones) as you can see in the picture there is a line of vertices that are being randomly affected it seems when the joint is moved. The only way to stop this happening is to move the inner sphere upwards so that it covers the majority of the panel only this gives a very stiff and wooden effect which I'm not after at all - I want something with more give like material, which works on the other panels when the inner sphere is moved towards the end of the panel.

Any ideas anyone?

I should add that it only appears to do this on the vertices that sit along the centre line between left and right halves of the geometry. I've double-checked the orginal model for duplicates and unwelded items but this doesn't seem to be the cause.

A few ideas:

• Conside capsule zones instead of spheres as it will help you visualize your placement a little better and may give you the gradient of influence you're looking for.  (P8 and up)
• If you need to stay with spheres, just the display properties of your spheres to something more solid so you can better see how they're placed with respect to your mesh.   You may be having some issue with how the curve to the spheres are interacting and it will be easier to see your zones.  Just select the zone and go to Display -> Object Style  and try something like "hidden line".   
• Resort to multiple bones per piece that needs to curve.   This how I handle strings, ropes and long tails.   Check out easy-pose underground or philC's "All Tied Up."
• Resort to magnets including magnets parented to bones.
• Resort to weight-maps (P9 and up)

HTH,

-K

Kerwin, thanks for the suggestions. I've already looked at capsule zones as an alternative and they were free from this effect but didn't quite give the result desired. The item already has a huge number of additional bones as well (48), so I'm reluctant to multiply this any further.

Considering that the issue occurs only along the centre line between left and right halves, however, I've tweaked the original model to remove that line and re-imported and rigged the figure and - hey presto - the issue no longer occurs (see new image).

As it doesn't happen with capsule zones when a centre line exists, or not with spherical zones when no centre line exists this seems to suggest a problem with spherical zones used in conjunction with vertices that sit on this 'join'.

I have seen this over the years and with different versions of Poser though only rarely. Not really sure what causes it, sometimes a reboot would fix it or as you have done here with an alteration to the mesh.