hi there,

so i've been recently experimenting with sculpting and rigging things in blender and importing them into poser through the FBX format. everything was fine until now, since this time, i need to be able to use the "symmetrize" option in poser.

my observation: when i import said FBX into poser, the groups are getting messed up, since poser seems to give each group an individual name. while a bone is named "bone.L.001" in blender, in poser the internal name and the group for the bone changes into something like "bone.L.001_400" even renaming the bones in blender to fit poser's naming-conventions ("r_bone_1" instead of "bone.R.1") doesn't help.

i made a pair of floppy animal ears and in the screenshot, you'll see what i mean ("ohr" is german for "ear" just in case you wonder)

what i tried: i already tried renaming everything in poser's setup room; creating new groups, applying the polygons from the old groups to the new ones and deleting the old groups (and i didn't forget to also rename the internal names of the bones). when i'm finished doing this, it all works great. but when i save it into my library and load the model from the library into the scene... i can't select the bones via my mouse cursor anymore -.-

going into the setup room again, only the bones are visible, but no mesh.

in the posing room, the mesh is visible, but can't be selected anymore.

the only way of manipulating the bones is by selecting them in the upper left corner :/

does anyone know how to fix this ?

is there a way of renaming a group without having to create a new one?

i'd appreciate any help

does nobody have an idea how to solve or at least circumvent the problem?

i'm sure there are at least a handful of people who create and rig their models in blender and

transfer those into poser 11 pro o_O

My personal experience with FBX and Poser and rigging is that you can only pose the individual parts of a figure manually. Furthermore, when importing a rigged compound FBX figure, Look at the Hierarchy window, and use the topmost FBX figure to pose all the “conformed” figures appearing below it. This may even be Teeth or Pants, but so long as it appears as the topmost of the hierarchy window list, that’s the one to use for posing. Finally, if you have zero pose in frame 1 and a different pose in say frame 30, Poser does not pose the figure in the frames in-between. I find that the pose in frane 1 is the same all the way through to frame 29, and then frame 30 gets the different pose. No tweening or interpolation of poses.

Actually, as long as you don't "apply" the armature in the modifier tab within blender, you can transfer it from blender into poser as an .FBX and it can be then posed like any regular poser-specific model. the issue is the grouping-tool in poser. it adds those numbers to any bone and group, nullifying any possibility to use the symmetry option for the posing. furthermore, it seems not possible to rename existing groups... (is there any way to rename existing groups??)

i'm rendering still images, meaning i don't use frames, so i didn't encounter the problem you described.

I couldn't find a way to rename/create groups via the API, the manual just says to use the grouping tool. If this was a mat or hair group we could automate the process but because its a part group it does not appear possible. The group numbering appears on figures exported from Poser as fbx and then re-imported so it seems a general feature. I would raise this with SM support as it might require a code change to fix.

ok thanks, i'll contact smith micro and will post an update on the issue later

I have actually no experience with FBX, but what you are describing with renaming and missing then the mesh for the bones is making sense. Renaming the bones incl. the internal names is only valid for the Poser CR2/PP2 etc. but not changing the groupnames in the OBJ-file. And then Poser can't find the mesh for the bones. This is the way if exporting/importing OBJ-file. Not sure if it is other way with FBX cause normally Poser is taking the basic geometrie file as is. One more problem with groups is/can be that Poser is working with "bone"-groups and "material(color)"-groups. For example I work mostly with C4D for modelling and so a (Poser-)group is a selection of polygons in C4D. Such selections may be overlapping one for bone and one for material. In that way Poser can't work with it. So normally you have to decide if you make material-groups or bone-groups and have to create the missng directly new in Poser. Or you work with the marvellous Riptide-plugin which is controlling the group target via a tag selection you have to maintain before exporting, also work with scaling from "normal" OBJ sizes to the Poser typical tiny ones. In that way bone-groups and material-group are coming to Poser without any naming trouble. If I see your struggle I guess I will stay with the OBJ-export ... B.t.w. if you store the renamed stuff in Poser is there a new created OBJ-file around and if so what groupnames is Poser saving in there, should start with "g bonegroupname". Would be interesting what Poser support is answering ... hope they are inbetween more customer related than with my last experiences with them ...

here's an update:

i found a workaround which doesn't really solve the problem, but allows to at least save the file into the poser library after all groups and bones have been fixed by renaming them. simply save the model as a scene. for some reason, if you save it as a figure, it won't work properly anymore, but if you save it as a scene instead, it works. just remember to remove all unwanted items (such as lights, skydomes and other stuff)

i contacted poser's support and the first few days they tried to help me, but the support guy probably thinks i'm exporting it the wrong way in blender, so i didn't get any response for the last 2 weeks. he thinks the problem lies within poser's inability to handle FBX files above ver. 2014, which you can't adjust in blender.

PS: poser messes up it's own .FBX files, try it yourself. just export any rigged model (for example "andy") as an .FBX and reimport it, open the grouping tool or check through the setup room, you'll notice all groups and bones got some numbers added to them. you won't be able to mirror any poses anymore.