hmmm... the arms and legs, you mean? grab the curve dial and yank it around. see if you see anything happening. i'm not sure how well it will work on such long pieces. also, if you expected the curve parameter on forearm and upper arm (say) to make the arm move/look like spaghetti.... you're asking a bit much. ;) also make sure each part has plenty of vertices for the curve parameter to work with. and... there's really no way to control which way the curve parameter curves things. i think it picks a certain axis, and decides which way is 'positive' curve and which way is negative curve.

It works better if you add a couple more joints, (as in segments) to the elbow & knee areas . Then apply curves to each segment. Usually I see the curve feature added to tails on an animal, but I don't see why it won't work on those cute little arms legs too. I reco setting the min & max rotation for all the segments to keep a tight leash on their wanderings. Usually 20 degrees in the bend, zero in the front to back.

The curve feature was designed to get animals' tails right. See e.g. the Poser horse's tail. The curved limb / tail / tentacle would have to be divided into at least 5 segments of equal length. My flamethrower's model fuel hose has 8. - If the limb/etc necks off at one point, curse all Poser bugs and move that joint a bit. - If kinks or gaps develop at the inner or outer end of a chain of curved segments, interpose a very short extra non-curve non-rigid segment.

I use curves all the time, like Anthony said you really need 4+ segments of curve for it to really have an effect. You can cheat this by making other parts curve, and then setting the curve dial at 0 for the part you don't want to curve. To get it to stay there set the min and max at 0 for that curve dial and turn on "use limits" -Trav

Okay. Too few segments, low polygon count. Thank you everyone. Such a problem that stupid little guy has been! Compose would not read the .obj, and Poser would not read the PHI (C Exceptions!?!). I had to use the Hierarchy Editor method, and I'm not sure how I got that to work after several failed attempts. Once I had a .cr2, I had to cut-and-paste from another character to add the curve channel...should have mentioned that before. Since the figure does not refer to a base geometry, everything is listed as a CustomGeom in the .cr2. Hopefully after a few more attempts this process will not seem so damnable to me.

I don't need the fancy stuff that you write about. I simply type the .PHI file using a text editor, same as typing a program in C or Fortran or whatever. If a part is to be curved, append `curve' to that line, like e.g. in the start of my flamethrower's .PHI file:- objFile :aa:fl:fl.obj 1 tank yxz 2 tube1 xyz curve 3 tube2 xyz curve 4 tube3 xyz curve 5 tube4 xyz curve 6 tube5 xyz curve 7 tube6 xyz curve 8 tube7 xyz curve 9 tube8 xyz curve 10 tube9 xyz curve 11 tube10 xyz curve 11 nozzle xyz 2 rtstrap1 yxz curve ...

I tried that. I also generated the same thing using PHI Editor. I got C Exceptions when I tried to convert the PHI in Poser 4. PHI Editor said everything was okay. Why would this happen?

Because the first release of Poser 4 keeps making C Exceptions, because some boss in Metacreations wanted Poser 4 to be on sale hurryhurryhurry and couldn't want for it to be properly debugged. Is there any evitence what sort of C Exception? If it is `Protection Violation' or the like, it is likely that old programming bugbear, an out of bounds access to an array or looking up a pointer which is not set or = 0. Let us hope that the patch will cure it. (When will the patch be available again?)

It looked like the same Exception error I used to get before I increased my RAM. I now have 128 MB RAM, which seems to be sufficient, except when I make the mistake of trying to edit a character when I have several figures loaded at once. The only way I could differentiate the Exception might be the number/type at the end of the error message, but I neglected to make a not of that. I can't wait for the final patch. I just hope it doesn't "cure" features that I like, which may not have been intended by the programmers. Didn't someone mention that one of the .cr2 editing techniques doesn't work under the current patch?

Didn't someone mention that one of the .cr2 editing techniques doesn't work under the current patch? Which editing technique doesn't work?

I think I had my wires slightly crossed when I typed that. Needed a bit more sleep at the time. :) I think someone posted something that mentions the deleting of the .rsr as no longer working under the patch. It wasn't really explained, so I could be misinterpreting. It's around here somewhere....