pjz99 posted at 9:30 AM Mon, 6 July 2009 - #3476417 drift boss

I can't afford the DAZ setup tools.  I can tell you some things that can help you avoid some of the bugs with the Setup room and other aspects of rigging:

• When you are adding bones in the Setup room, hide every bone you do not absolutely need visible.  Poser very "helpfully" changes your selection when drawing bones with the Bone tool and when you're placing bones that are close together, e.g. at the fingers, it can happen that you end up with a bone that has the incorrect parent.  You are screwed at this point and Undo will often leave you with a broken hierarchy with joints that don't deform the figure any more.  Revert to a saved file before this happened.
• Sometimes when you place bones very close to other bones, like at the fingers, they can also have screwed up hierarchy and stop deforming the figure.  I'm not sure if this is related to, or the same as, the problem named above, but as of now I just don't draw bones near each other any more.  I find it safer to just draw them off in space and then adjust them with the Joint Editor outside of the Setup room.
• When you are adjusting falloff zones and they start to "tumble", sometimes you can stop this from happening by zeroing any rotation of the falloff zone first, then adjusting position and scale, and then re-applying rotation.
• If you are doing a rig that employs "body handle" geometry, like the posing handles I've put on different skirt rigs, leave the handle geometry out of the CR2 until the very end.  It's a bit inconvenient to be forced to select those bones from menu only but it's also a lot safer.
• All bones at the symmetry line should always have X translation values of zero.  Also rotation values for Y and Z axes should be zero.  The Joint Editor can be misleading because it only shows three decimal places.  Sometimes you get an amusing "-0" in a value.  Force these values to be zero either by typing them into Joint Editor, or by editing the CR2 afterward (editing the CR2 is the only way to be really, really sure).  If any of these values at the symmetry line bones are not zero, then your rig is not symmetrical, which is bad when you have a symmetrical mesh (the mesh will not deform symmetrically).

oops one more:  Sometimes you have a "-0" in a value and simply typing in "0" will not get it to be properly zero.  Type in some other integer value like 1, and then change it back to 0.

These are really helpful tips!