I know I had this problem a number of years ago, and edited the pp2 file directly, but I have no clue what I did, and I'm having no luck searching online.

Basically, I created a skull cap for personal use from V4's head, and then grew hair from it. It was parented. Unfortunately, neither the item in the original scene nor the prop I saved to the library moves with V4. In fact, the skull cap itself will not translate whatsoever, although the individual hair group props can be moved with the translate dials.

I think I've found the correct general area in the pp2 file to edit in Notepad++, but it's too obtuse (or I am) for me to determine exactly what I need to edit.

(FWIW, I've also tried exporting the prop as a Wavefront obj, but that doesn't work. It crashes Poser, and even though a file is created, when I restart Poser and attempt to import it, it fails to load.)

Can anyone help me figure what I need to edit? Would hate to lose this work, but honestly I've probably already spent more time in attempted troubleshooting than I did creating the hair to begin with....

Using Poser 11, FWIW.

I should add that one thing I tried was deleting a line I found in the pp2 that identified the parent as universe, but that didn't seem to do anything at all.

Poser has trouble exporting strand-based hair because it tries to export the strand data.

You might want to see if the prop isn't locked.

It's a prop, it's dynamic hair, you have to run the simulation. First you have to use a cloth room sim to get the skull cap where it needs to be, then if you need to, run a hair simulation to get it into place and to fall naturally. Otherwise you might need to make the skull cap a conforming figure.

Parenting methods...

in example parenting Ball_1 to RoundCube_1, select and right click target child ball entry, choose cube as parent

or

drag and drop ball onto cube in Hierarchy which will parent the ball to the cube

or

With desired reparent object selected Object Menu:Change Parent, select target.

You'll probably want your hair prop to load as a smart prop, which will cause the prop to load already parented to its target head. When you save the prop to the Library and it's parented to something while saving, an option to save as a Smart Prop will pop up...

If you like text editing here's the entry for changing something to a Smart Prop in the pp2 controls branch, in this instance the smart parent is the head... change from parent UNIVERSE to the entry shown...

RedPhantom: Thanks, I'll doublecheck that, although I think I looked at it before.

primorge: thanks for the text editing info. I will try that. I certainly know how to parent; I've been using Poser since 2008. :) As I said, it was parented when I saved it, and I reparented it after loading. Interestingly, I don't think I've ever been prompted to save something as a smartprop, so far as I can recall.

Sunfire: Thank you for trying to help, but your advice is incorrect. Neither hair room hair nor underlying skullcaps have anything to do with the cloth room; and I have used hair room hair without running a sim hundreds of times. I don't particularly use it for the dynamics; I use it because I prefer the look of strand-based hair (and the flexibility and challenge of creating my own without being a modeler).

Well, I still don't know what's going on. I altered the hr file in a text editor, as advised. The skullcap prop is not locked, and it claims to be parented. But it's not loading on the head or even close to it, and won't move. The hair room groups will move via translate, but the skullcap thinks it belongs in the middle of nowhere and won't budge.

Believable3D posted at 4:08 AM Tue, 29 March 2022 - #4436525

Well, I still don't know what's going on. I altered the hr file in a text editor, as advised. The skullcap prop is not locked, and it claims to be parented. But it's not loading on the head or even close to it, and won't move. The hair room groups will move via translate, but the skullcap thinks it belongs in the middle of nowhere and won't budge.

Sometimes, even the sensitivity's value is so low that it seems to refuse to move

Thanks, Y-Phil. The settings did look odd (-860,000 and +860,000), but changing the numbers to 200 didn't help, even when trying to move 200 in one goes. The prop stays in the same place. Anyway, the hair strand props had the same settings, and they move fine.

I think I'm probably going to have to give up on this one, and go back to using other people's skullcaps. I tried reparenting the hair pieces to 3Dream's MSC, but then the hair room no longer recognized it and it only renders the basic strands.

...

...

That one stumped me too, how to get that "do you want to save it as a smart prop" prompt. And the solution turned out to be to save the item to the library WITHOUT first selecting it from a dropdown menu. I would typically use a dropdown or whatever means to make sure I was saving only the item I wanted to save, but you don't get the prompt that way. So just make sure the intended item is selected in your scene, click to add it to the props library, and you should get that message. (I'm guessing it works the same when saving to the hair library, but hair is just a special kind of prop, so either library should work.)

As for the skull cap that won't move, did you double check that the parameter settings have the min limit as a negative number (and the max limit as a positive number)? That one's tripped me up before.

Also: is the skullcap coming from embedded geometry (geometry coordinates left in the library file) or from a reference to an external OBJ? Sometimes embedded geometry can cause problems, so I use Netherworks' Creator's Toybox to extract external OBJs from embedded geometry in both items I've made and items from others. 

One final thought that's more of a question, I guess: do you need to use a skull cap to use dynamic hair on V4? Is the idea that using a skull cap lets you more easily save just the hair? I used dynamic hair on the HW Horse to make a fuzzy Fjord, and I created the hair groups right on the figure (no "skull cap" needed). I saved the whole horse to the library and it loads into new scenes just fine. 

perpetualrevision posted at 4:45 PM Wed, 30 March 2022 - #4436575

That one stumped me too, how to get that "do you want to save it as a smart prop" prompt. And the solution turned out to be to save the item to the library WITHOUT first selecting it from a dropdown menu. I would typically use a dropdown or whatever means to make sure I was saving only the item I wanted to save, but you don't get the prompt that way. So just make sure the intended item is selected in your scene, click to add it to the props library, and you should get that message. (I'm guessing it works the same when saving to the hair library, but hair is just a special kind of prop, so either library should work.)

As for the skull cap that won't move, did you double check that the parameter settings have the min limit as a negative number (and the max limit as a positive number)? That one's tripped me up before.

Also: is the skullcap coming from embedded geometry (geometry coordinates left in the library file) or from a reference to an external OBJ? Sometimes embedded geometry can cause problems, so I use Netherworks' Creator's Toybox to extract external OBJs from embedded geometry in both items I've made and items from others. 

One final thought that's more of a question, I guess: do you need to use a skull cap to use dynamic hair on V4? Is the idea that using a skull cap lets you more easily save just the hair? I used dynamic hair on the HW Horse to make a fuzzy Fjord, and I created the hair groups right on the figure (no "skull cap" needed). I saved the whole horse to the library and it loads into new scenes just fine. 

As noted above, I've already checked the parameter settings.

Personally, my guess is that something happened when I created the skullcap. I did it the way the Poser manual has historically said to it for non-distributable hair, i.e. spawning a prop from a group I created on V4's head.

Certainly, you do not *need* to use a skullcap; you can grow the hair directly on the head. But you lose a ton of flexibility that way. You're bound to always loading the same character if you want to use the hair, and you can't transfer it to another figure. It just makes a whole lot more sense to use a skullcap.

I actually used 3Dream's Master Skull Cap recently, but for various reasons I wanted to try it the "old way."

I used to have good luck with PhilC's skullcap, but unfortunately my main 3D hard drive got wiped clean and I lost pretty much everything (including a whole bunch of original work), and he's no longer in business, so I can't just redownload it like I did with stuff from Daz, Rendo, and ShareCG.

Hm. As I write this, I just realized that I redownloaded one of my own hair props from ShareCG. I bet that has PhilC's skullcap — he had it as redistributable.

I was curious about this issue, so I gave it a try in Poser 12. I used an old Poser character, P6 James.

I made a group on his head, created a prop from it, went into the Hair Room to make some hair, and parented the prop to his head. My "hairwig" was showing as selected, so I went to add it to the Hair library. Got a message telling me to save the hair group with its parent prop, which is what I planned to do anyway. It saved to the Hair library.

New scene (didn't save the James scene or James with the hairwig). Added a new James. Added hairwig to new James. It went right where it was supposed to go and was parented to his head.

Now, I did a crappy job creating this hairwig. Maybe it would have come out differently if I'd used more verts per hair (I knocked it down to 4) or used more hairs (think I used 16,000). I dunno. I don't really use the Hair Room to know what works best, but, in Poser 12, I didn't run into any problems with the prop. Just wanted to make a note of this. Hope your problem can be resolved.