My previous question was answered so quickly and well that I thought I would ask a related one:

I have some props that appear to consist of separate items that load as a single prop—for example, one consists of a chair, two candleabras, and a stack of books. I would like to make them into separate items. I know I can get the effect I'm after by loading the prop several times and making different parts invisible in in the mat room, but It would be nice to separate the chair, the candleabras, and the stack of books and only load what I wanted. I am sure I did something like that in Poser several years ago, but I can't remember how.

if you can select and move the parts of the prop (with one load) about the scene, then you can Choose say the chair and Click
Edit > Memorize > Object
then go to the prop page of the library and click the PLUS sign to save.
Be SURE to click the selection button because the default is to Select NONE
And SAVE
Otherwise, it's the same answer you got for your previous question... the Grouping tool!

donnena, thanks for the info. My guess is that Poser thinks the pieces are a single prop, so it will only recognize the whole thing. I tried clicking on the chair and doing as you said, but that only made a copy of the entire prop.

Clearly, it's time for me to learn about the grouping tool. I'll poke through the manual now. Thanks for the pointer!

And learning how to do what I wanted with the grouping tool turns out to be pretty easy. Being able to select by material helped enormously.

I had no problem separating some parts of the prop (the books and the candleabras), but the chair cushions turned black and I can't figure out why. I tried copying the cushion material of the original chair and pasting it onto the new chair prop, but that didn't help. Any ideas?

As in your previous post of how to create separate body parts, you can do the same here. Go to the tool of the little square with the dot in the center (the grouping tool) click on it and then look for the option that says spawn props. This will cause every group to become a separate prop. hope this answers your question

AH.. guessing here....
but open your new friend the grouping tool and select the cushions.
Assign them a new material and save.
you can use an extincting material or make up a new one.

I LOVE those chairs!! so much whimsy in them!!!

Jin, spawn props didn't work in this case—it just created another copy of the whole prop. But thanks for the suggestion.

donnena, I may've goofed up something, but I didn't succeed. It's no biggie—I will spend some time with the manual on the grouping tool, and I currently have a copy of the prop with the other parts made invisible, which does the job for now.

The chair is from Gumdrops: Mille Delices Dark Library, which sometimes goes on sale. I'm rescaling it for M4 and V4, which seems to work best so far by reducing some parts to 60% and others to 75%. The grouping tool has helped enormously.

You don't want to use spawn prop but create prop.

RedPhantom, success! Thank you!