Hi, I have a problem during rig practice, regarding change of joint order. I had the joint order wrong and the twist axis was facing in the wrong direction, then I changed the joint order, acknowledged the warning popup, and clicked "align" on the joint centers to realign the bones. Now the twist axis is facing the right way in the UI, but the still the old twist axis remained in the figure somehow, and when I use twist it will move the vertices along the new axis but with the weights of the old twist settings. Is there anything I must click or do for a full refresh after change of joint axis? Thanks :)

If there isn't a better method available, you should be able to do this the hard way, by editing the cr2.  You would want to go into the "channels" section for your actor, then go into the "joint[xyz]" and "twist[xyz]" entries and swap around their weight map references, under "zones", then "weightmapzone".  Switch around the "mapname" listings.  That should allow you to change the weight map associations however you require.

Whether the re-associated maps would handle as intended, however, I don't know....  :unsure:

I think the twist axis was facing wrong in the beginning because the bone orientation was not aligned. Maybe I can just ignore the joint order entirely? (I did not yet quite understand if the joint order really does matter for anything other than intuitive Naming of the rotation parameters?)

Whether the joint order matters might depend on what kind of actor this is and how it relates to its parent or children in the rigging.  At the very least, there is a great difference between how Poser handles its "twist" and "joint" rotations.  My impulse is to suggest that for most body parts the rotation order probably does matter, but I haven't done extensive tests to verify that.  :unsure:

What sort of actor are you dealing with, and how does it fit into the rig? 

 

On edit: With the mapname editing I suggest above, the same swaps would have to be made for all actors affected by each joint.  If the mapname references don't correlate properly among all actors affected by a particular weight map, the results could be... messy.  This really could be "the hard way", in some cases.

This happens when I change the joint order. I am rigging the right thigh and changed joint to YZX or YXZ I tried them both. This messes things up it seems

 

Maybe the old orientation is still saved in the figure somehow.

This is with XYZ order (which the setup room created when I drew the bone). X is the twist axis here and it works properly.

In the post above, Y is twist axis, and I had the center aligned, this makes the UI draw the twist axis correctly but the influence is totally wrong

 

I want to rig a makehuman mesh

That is curious.    The XYZ influence looks correct for a Y-oriented joint order, and the Y orientation looks more correct for X.  Is the influence displayed above weight-mapping or Poser's default zone-based joint influence?

I've always avoided the Setup Room, unfortunately.  This may be a question for someone with Setup Room knowledge.  I know we have a few around here....

I'm chiming in here mainly to see if there is a simple answer. Like Cage, I rarely venture in to the setup room, and it usually seems easier to re-rig something if a mistake has been made.

Quote - My impulse is to suggest that for most body parts the rotation order probably does matter, but I haven't done extensive tests to verify that.

I've seen it suggested when building hierarchy files that the first axis should be along the direction of twist, and if possible the second axis in the rotation order should be the most-used bend. So for a forearm on a T-posed figure, the order should be XYZ: it would twist around the X axis, then bend mainly in Y. Z equates to side-side, which a human figure's forearm doeswn't usually do.  

Yes, that is why I attempted to change the joint order. The quoted suggestion is from the poser manual.

But now you made me curious, if you do not use setup room, does that mean there are other (external) utilities for figure setup?

I prefer to work closer to the bare metal than most. ;) I've mainly rigged mechanical items, and for that I import a hierarchy (PHI) file and then tweak using the joint editor and an external CR2 editor.

Quote - The quoted suggestion is from the poser manual.

Wow, I must have read it after all. :)