Typically when I create a pose controller I first create the Pose by hand and write down all of the rotations and body transforms that comprise the pose. I then manually create the dependencies for the pose dial by meticulously teaching each rotation and transform step by step into the dependency at 1 and then manually zeroing out each rotation at zero. For complex full body Poses this can be a rather long tedious process, in particular all the finger hand rotations. Mind numbing stuff.

I was always under the impression that simply saving my Pose to the library, creating an empty master, start teaching, and applying said pose via pz2 would be too easy or would introduce problems of one type or another.

Recently, as an experiment, I created a master, started teaching, and applied a rather complex Pose file I had saved to the library (just rotations and a body transform) to the figure. I expected Poser to crash honestly. The dependency editor started rapidly cycling through all of the rotations, recording them into the dependency stack in an alarming manner. This went on for a bit. Poser didn't crash but I figured I would have to force quit Poser as the DE flickered with the cycling/recording of the rotations. It suddenly stopped cycling through and the dependency stack had recorded everything that comprised the Pose.

I didn't experiment further by zeroing everything out but it seems like you can create a Pose controller this way.

I did notice however that rotations of the goal center of mass props were recorded.

My questions are as follows:

Is this a workable method of creating a controller?

Is the recording of the goal center of mass props rotations simply indicating the body transforms contained in the Pose?

Is this going to somehow adversely telescope or screw up JCMs that are in action involuntarily, that is operating automatically through the recorded rotations... or will it work as expected? I haven't noticed any JCM problems occuring when creating manually but better safe than sorry.

If this is a valid approach, will a Pose dot work also?

Any caveats?

Thanks.

As an aside, the reason I'm asking these questions is in order to create some morphed pose controllers. Quite a few actually. A dial that applies a Pose and an overall body sculpt difference morph (in a sense a full body pose specific full body jcm designed for that specific pose)... a morphed pose dial that's a sculpt to tweak and touch up things that regular JCMs can't deal with. A multi actor blanket JCM for a specific pose controlled by a single dial. A beauty pass morphed pose. Something that can be quite handy if there are a lot of them, naturally such a thing would be incredibly laborious to create if in quantity. Being able to apply a recorded pose from a pz2 into the dependency for the dial would make it very much less work.

Try this ...

When saving the pose select only the relevant body parts to the pose. For example a arms folded pose would only include the collar through the fingers. Save that as a pose.. Now save another pose with the same body parts zeroed.

Create your master dial and set it to 1 then start teaching

Load the first pose.

Zero the dial

Load the zero pose.

This will prevent the DE from creating a dependency for EVERY SINGLE DIAL in the entire figure.

This is still messy because it will include all dials for all the included body parts. Even those not actively being used.

Ok. Hm.

When you say "every single dial in the entire figure" do you mean every single actor rotation/ transform dial? I have a figure loaded with hundreds of morph dials but none of them are showing up in the dependency stack after applying the pose to the master. It does look like all of the rotations and transforms are though...

So I guess the moral of the story is create these dependencies by hand, as I had originally suspected. I just tested and the DE palette is suddenly acting strangely. Lesson learned.

Thanks for the advice Nerd, glad I got an informed opinion on this.

Ur... Have I done something wrong to you, primorge?

I am getting the same message.

Me too.

Either you have him on ignore, or he's ignoring you.

primorge seems to have changed something as I can read his messages since 1-2 days (I don't remember exactly, and I speak in terms of GMT+1...)

I most certainly did not set it to ignore so I guess I'm just not interesting. That's fine.