I've made a cottage with a door that has a sliding bolt. Everything works okay while it's still a prop, BUT, when I turn the cottage into a Poser 'character' so I can set the windows and door to swivel open, I can't slide the bolt any more as the x y z trans dials have disappeared. How can I make the bolt slide when it's part of the cottage as a Poser 'character'?

Open the cr2 in a text editor or use cr2Editor (free proggie by John Stallings). Find the translation dials in thr bolt and change Hidden 1 to Hidden 0 to unhide them.

The slider must slide along one of the 3 coordinate axes x y z compared to its parent. When you rotate the slider's coordinate axis system in the joint editor, that rotates the x y z rotation axes but not the x y x tran slide directions. Unless this is put right in Poser 5.

BIG THANKS AJAX!!! I had no idea I could do that with cr2Editor. Makes life so much easier. I will pass that on. Meanwhile, a kind friend has sent me instructions on how to turn the bolt into a morph target.

Yep, you can certainly do it with a morph target. It will add a little to your cr2 size but only as many lines as there are vertices in the bolt.

Now I'm stuck! What do you mean by 'only as many lines as ther are vertices'...and what is a vertice?

A vertex (singular vertex, plural verices) is a pointy bit, like the corner of a triangle. In the case of a mesh, it's a point at the corner of a polygon. Don't worry about it. You don't need to do anything with it. I'm just saying that if you use a morph instead of unhiding a translation dial, then your cr2 file gets bigger. To be exact, Poser adds one line to the cr2 file for each vertex your morph moves. If the bolt is a simple box, that's no big deal. If the bolt is a high detail object with 10,000 polygons, then a morph will add a whole lot to the size of your cr2.

The bolt should be a separate jointed part. You will have to go into the "joint editor" and set both thr bolt and the door to "do not bend". Or, go into the CR2 file with a text editor and put a star before the first letter in the title line of all "paragraphs" that describe "joint" and "twist" and "smoothScale" type channels of the joint between the bolt and the door, that star tells Poser to ignore those channels.

Yes, you will need to turn bending off. I usally do it with a global find and replace in the cr2. Fine "bend 1" and replace it with "bend 0". You'll need to check whether that's a space or a tab in between the word and the number. The other way is to use the object properties box, but you'll have to do it one at body part at a time.

Thank you all. I will have to think about the vertex bit. So often things are very simple but techincal words make it seem difficult. I do want to know about this so I can improve my modelling and someday make more interesting morph targets. I'd already figured it would be useful to globally switch off bending, but global search and finds tend to crash cr2 editor.

Just use a text editor for the find and replace. Wordpad works fine.