F'rinstance, if you want a figure to stand in the far left corner, and sitting down on a chair, or whatever other pose, is it possible to do that, and save that in your pose library for recall? Thanks

in some cases yes, Transpond, the makers of the dwarveb caves and several other large figure environments. use PLACE poses. They don't go so far as to put a figure at xyz c-ord and in a seat pose, but it can place the figure at XZY. Travler and transpond know how to change a file to do it, but they wouod be the ones to ask. they do hang round here but it is easier/faster to get then at runtimeDNA

You can do it by using a text editor to add a little bit of info to the pose file. The info you need to add corresponds to the settings of the x, y and z translation dials of "BODY". Just follow the same format as the rest of the pose file. It's not hard to work out once you have a look.

Ajax is right. We purposely strip out the actual pose information as not to interfere with the user poses, and leave the xyz coodinates only. But with a little text editing you can retain both, if desired. For an example of the placement aspect of it, there are placement poses for the Prancing Pony Inn in my freestuff. I'd be happy to help you with any questions you may have in this thread, by IM, or in the RuntimeDNA forums.

That's very cool! Thanks evryone and Judith for the offer. I'll go check out the prancing ponies...you just may have a question or 2 coming.

Perhaps I am misunderstanding the question? This is what pose files do. Just pose the character in a sitting position, at whatever location you want in the scene, and save the pose. When you apply the pose the character will come in at exactly the same position in the same pose. The only thing you have to watch out for is the position and rotations of the "BODY" element. This is important in two respects. 1). Poser does not save translations or rotations of the BODY element to a pose, so the x,y, and z translations and rotations of the BODY should be zero before you start posing the character, and you should position the character by translating the hip not the BODY. 2). When you apply the pose the translations and rotations of the BODY element should be zero, otherwise the pose translations will be added on top of those for the BODY.

If you don't want to manually zero the BODY's translations and rotations you can edit the pose file to do this automaticly, just add a body section, the format is like this:

{

version
{
number 4.01
}
thighLength 0.213434
//---Body section starts here---
actor BODY:2
{
channels
{
rotateY yrot
{
keys
{
k 0 0
}
}
//---More channels here---
translateZ ztran
{
keys
{
k 0 0
}
}
//---End of body section---
actor hip:2
{
channels

I have only shown the first and last channels above, but I hope you get the idea, you would have to include channels for each x.y,y,z, rotation and translation.

You could also implement the pose from a dial in the characters parameter pallet, via an ERC, but that is a little more complicated.

P.S. A quick way to zero the body is press SHIFT+CTRL+F on the keyboard, but this also zeros the morphs.

If you ever intend to tie morphs and gravity effects to a figure automatically, using the hip for physical location will mess this up. hip rotations should be used to orient the figure to gravity. hip trans - are useful in animations - if the IK are on. BODY rotations and trans are meant to locate a figure on stage. It looks as though the original programers expected pose files to save a generic body pose and PZ3 files to save the scene setup. They probably did not imagine a pose file being use the set a scene, so they left BODY channels out of a pose file. As has been said, it is easy to hack BODY rot/trans into a pose file - as long as there is a slot made for them. hip rotations and trans being used hapazardly is the rule. When running through a series of poses - using the front camera to view for example - the hip should remain at zero twist - as if skewered - and above and below wriggling and rotating back and front and/or side-side as the pose dictates. This is very rare. I have gravity JCM that are controlled by hip rotations, so they must be used reproducibly. The Poser 5 demo shows effects that may require that the figure be done in this way - to be able to tell where up and down are for the figure. If so, a whole lot of legacy poses will not be usable unless edited.

OK, I just tried a really basic idea based on what Jaager sugested. I took one of my characters, placed a barstool prop on stage and posed her sitting sort of halfway on, halfway off, then selected her by the hip after she appeared on the stage (I do that with a lot of my girls!lol!...anyway I digress.) and moved her backwards to the back center of the ground area. (I have my preferences set so that when poser comes up, the ground guide comes up with white shag carpet automatically.) Then, I saved her pose by going into the 'subset' dialog box that comes up after you hit the '+' sign under the pose library, then deselected everything. Then went back and re-selected her character only, not even the clothes she was in since it was an experiment anyway, and I had a wacky feeling that since they were 'conforming' they would stay on her. Shut down Poser, restarted and loaded the character, went to the Pose library and selected her pose, and wah-lah badaboom. Clothes stayed on too! It's probably not near as versatile as what y'all were suggesting with all the scripting and hacking, but it's kind of what I was looking for. I've read many of y'all's explanations for things throughout the 'rosity forums. Someone should compile it into a book--you'ld make a small fortune to split up.:-) Thanks again, Adam