Quote -
You are not able to parent both hands to a prop, or a prop to both hands. You will need to manually pose the second hand according to the position of the first hand and its child prop.

I remember in another thread I made here afew months ago on a different subject, someone mentioned it was possible to use IK to link the figure to an object

Would it be possible to parent the right hand, and use IK for the left?

Adjusting manually will probably lead to strangeness and inconsistency.

I have my sword mae in blnder, so I suppose I could just import that. What format does it need to be in for use as a poser prop ?

yes

Quote -  try this on for size.

put element "A" on a layer    
put element "A+B" on another

change the blending mode of one of them to "difference"

flatten, invert the colours.  

Thanks. That's the kind of answer I was looking foi. A bit incomplete, but I worked out the rest from there. Doing this turned the apple a solid color, which made it easy to crete a layer mask showing only the banana

Quote - I
Can you post a pic of the actual image you're working on?

As mentioned in the OP, I don't HAVE a specific picture I'm working on, yet. This is more something that would be good to knoiw for future. Difference blending seems to do the job well.

here's a visual aid I whipped up. The apple represents element a, the banana is element b.

Using these two images, and preferably without tedious manual work, how can I get a picture of the banana alone?

Thank you everyone. I'm getting the hang of it now : )

Does indeed sound complex. I'll experiment with it.

Quote - Use IK chains on feet to "plant" the feet on the ground then rotate the hip, move one foot, rotate somemore etc....

That's.. not any easier at all. And it would mess up the pose...

oki. I managed to pull it off with some limited success. I made the motions too exaggerated, though.

Also, the layer says it's playing for the full (120) frames of my test anim. but it's only a 7 frame animation. It just plays once at the start, though it does seem to have the desired effect.

And idea how I can make that layer loop repeatedly over the underlying anim? OIr will I have to create the shaking layer to the right length before adding it ?

I know nothing of poser physics. Sounds intriguing.

Your suggestion with the babell, is unfortunately not applicable. I'm not actually making weightlifting anims. I was merely using that as an example to give the general idea. Also, I can't use props, / don't think.

I'm really liking the idea of making a universally applicable animation layer, as I have a lot of different pplications for this.I made a 7 frame anim for testing, and I'm now trying to figure out how to actually apply it to the layer.

That's an intriguing prospect. Working on it now. From previous experiments with daz, I've found it seems to look best with a small motion every 3 frames or so.but a single motion won;'t really be enough, so maybe a 7 frame layer.

gets to work

edit: 3 motions with one every third frame makes 7 frames, not 9

hmm. Additive. I looked through the manual, a bit. I'm guessing I can do this with slight mods on a zeroed figure. Figureing that parts which are zeroed, will have no effect when added.. x + 0 == x;

I'm worried about feet moving strangely, though. Do you think it will stop the feet from moving if I enable IK before adding it to the anim ?

Experimentation time, methinks...

Quote - Actually you can save a short motion as a pose in any version of Poser.
(This is pretty much what Poser was meant for in the first place!)

Select your figure; get into the Pose library and hit the plus sign at the bottom.
Poser will ask you to pick a subset of body parts, and ask which frames
to store.

To repeat, simply move forward by the length of the cycle and re-apply the
animated pose.

I knew that part. But using the pose will override whatever is currentl on the figure.. I meant a tutorial about animation layers, so it doesn't override.

Quote - if you can get it right once, you can save it as an animation layer or even a pose, and apply as needed, if you have Poser7

Really? That sounds very good. have a link to a tutorial on how?

I do have poser 7

I got the jiggle thing. Playing with that now.

As I mentioned above, I've already tried the naturaliser.

And I have tried doing it by hand, but this is something I need to do on a great many animations.  Doing it by hand is slow and tedious, and still ends up looking a bit strange.