I have several props that I made in Rhino that I want to make poseable, ie. a helmets visor go up and down, a bow being drawn back, a pistols slide move back and forth, etc. What is the best way to do this? I dont really want to save a prop as individual props and parent them together, I would like for them to be one prop with morph dials to control the movements. Thanks for any help.

I'm no expert here and some of the movements you want I think are problematic. However, you can use a single welded mesh in the setup room of either P4/PP or P5 and assign bones to them. You can either have the bone structure autoselect the mesh or select the mesh yourself. As for sliding the visor up and down, I think you will need a seperate mesh for that because the entire visor object will have to move rather than just being distorted. Hope this helps. If no takers, I'd be glad to try and bone a helmet with seperate objects.

I'm no expert either, but here is my understanding. Poseable props are made of a number of objects parented together, probably using limits to restrict the motion. If you want to use only one obj file you would have to do it as a figure (cr2), and the obj would have to contain a group for each movable part.

Here ya go, step by step:-

1. Load your two props into the scene and position
2. Export as OBJ with "keep groups" selected
3. Open the OBJ in UV Mapper (www.uvmapper.com)
4. Ignore what the screen looks like at this stage just select by group to ensure that your group names are correctly defined and there are no spaces in their names
5. File/save
6. Write a hierarchy file using the format set out on page 309 of the Poser 4 Manual. Rotation order (xyz) wont matter for what you are doing here)
7. Back into Poser File/convert Hier file
8. Follow the prompts then load the created figure from the library.
9. Select each part in turn and go to Object/properties and turn bending off.
10. If you have rotating parts use the Window/Joint editor to set their centers.
11. When completed save back to the library

That's about it. Its possible to tidy up by hiding the dials you don't want and dong a better UV texture map but thats the basics.

Hope this helps.

Phil, you got that on your CD?

I've tried it that way many times Phil, it never works.

If you are interested I can email you a tutorial I did that may help you....Sharen

There is a whole bunch of stuff on the CD. I do go into full detail of how to make figures using both the hierarchy method and editing an existing CR2 file. I fully cover joint parameters including spherical fall off zones. For a list of what's on there look on my site.

Nice thing is that I get emails back from folks saying that they can now understand it. If you want to see my writing style then go to the Curious Labs site and look in the Poser 5 Tutorials section.

ming, if you'd like to give me more details I may be able to help you.

Ming, What happens when you try this? ScottA

Yep, Phil's steps are 100% correct and by following them, you should have no problems whatsoever. The absolutely CRUCIAL step in exporting the obj with the correct options. I check the 1st option and uncheck ALL the others. In my experience, anyone who has problems has usually exported wrongly. You can also use something like PHI Builder to make the PHI file, but a PHI is only a couple of lines (for a simple figure), so it's easy to do in Notepad. The other important thing is to switch off 'bend' otherwise your figure goes bananas. mac

Thanks for all the great sugetions. I played around with your step by step instructions Phil, did'nt work the the way it should but I figure I did something wrong somewhere. Guess that will teach me to try this stuff sometime other than 3am. I'll give it another go after some long needed sleep. And thanks for the offer for the tutorial Sharen, I never turn down an offer for more information. If you dont mind sending it I would like to have it, my email is RG1034@msn.com. Thanks again everyone.

3 am, yes I know how that goes :)

If you'd like to show me what you produced I can probably guide you from there if needed.