I’m in need of some help on this umbrella I’m making, hopefully from someone who understands Poser weight maps. Note the two pictures, one is the umbrella cr2 in Daz Studio 4.7. In order to collapse the umbrella, each rib bends down, and I also scale each rib group (which includes the cloth part of the umbrella above that rib) in the z or x (width) direction. You’ll notice in DS I get a nice smooth scale, and fairly good results.

However, with the exact same cr2 file in Poser 9, results are different. Instead of a smooth scale, I get an overlap effect, with less than stellar results. I don’t know enough about Poser weight maps to figure out what’s wrong—I’ve played around with the falloff zones, with little or no change.

Anybody know what I’m doing wrong? Thanks for any suggestions.

There are a few different ways I would go about this, personally. Keep in mind, too, that there is no right and wrong with this: if it works, it's right and that's all that matters. 

Skin Weights: following through with what seems to be your starting point currently, you would need to get very nuanced with your skin weights. One of my personal tricks for working with them, especially on something like this, would be to animate it over about 20-30 frame in it's most extreme poses; in this case, it would be from completely open to completely closed. From there, I would use the left and right arrow keys to walk back and forth, frame by frame, while keeping the skin weight tool open, making small changes as needed. On something mechanical like this, you will probably be able to see the values that work best once one of the ribs is done then mirror the weights to get quite a bit taken care of, then, probably down the center, reproducing what you observed on another to get those brought into line, Be forewarned, though: this can be a tedious process. 

Morph to joint linkage: a simpler, more backward/cross compatible method would be to have the canopy of the umbrella morph between, let's say, closed, open mid and fully open, then put a dial on the handle and set these three morphs to be driven in succession, then link the arms to follow this at each of the keys where a morph is dialed on. The tricky part is that the morphs would need to turn off and on exactly right or you can end up with some strangeness, but that's only if you're doing multiple. If it can be a simple 2 morph solution, then the vertices can move along a relatively straight enough vector that making the bones follow and linking them up to that is not that hard. 

I apologize for not pulling up an example right off and posting any screenshots of what I'm talking about here, and since I'm speaking more conceptually than specifically, if something mentioned deserves an illustration of some kind, just let me know and as soon as I have a moment, I'll be sure to pop something in here. -Les

Thanks for the reply.  Yes, others were telling me that this could get complicated.  And since I only have Poser 9, not pro, I don't even think I have the ability to adjust skin weights (I could be wrong). I finally solved it by just creating a morph for the umbrella fully closed.  Just the one morph was sufficient for the umbrella to close smoothly.

Glad you got something worked out there. P9, I'm pretty sure, does have the ability to edit skin weights, btw, but in a case like this where all that's needed is for vertices to travel along a straight vector, a morph is a perfectly fine option. -Les