bushi: Thanks for starting the discussion. But if Posette were 5'11, Vicki would be 6'2 or more, and even if we think of her as a fashion model, that seems too tall. My first guess would be that "Ideal Adult Height" for Posette is 5'8 (still several inches above average U.S. female height, by the way, but maybe that's where the "ideal" comes in), bringing Vicki to just under 5'11. Did you perhaps mean Vicki when you said 5'11?

doozy: I know this must be a spectacularly dumb question, especially from someone who's been using Poser for five or six years, but what do you mean by a "poser unit?" I know that if you import a Wavefront Object at "100% figure height" it comes in at Posette's height, so that's obviously not what you mean. What's a unit?

Success! Exporting and importing the parent takes the curse off! I just hadn't realized the problem was in the parent. Thanks for pointing me in the right direction, Ajax.

A few minutes later:

Setting up this experiment for you caused me to do a few more for myself. I finally absorbed what you were saying a few messages back, Ajax. This problem is a function of scaling the parent. What happens is that the child acquires the scaling of the parent when it is parented: the effect is much more noticeable and distortionary if the child is tilt-rotated.

Since you did mention this problem before, I'm thinking that it isn't peculiar to my version after all.

And it sounds like it can be worked around. If the parent has to be scaled, maybe exporting it and importing it before adding the child will reset its zeroes. I'll try it and report back.

Good idea, but I thought of it. That's not the problem.

Ajax, could you do this quick experiment for me?

New File:
Take a Cylinder from Props: Prop Types.

Increase Y scale to 200%. Decrease X and Z scale to 50%.

Add a second cylinder.

Widen cyl_2 to 150% x and z.
Shorten cyl_2 to 50% y.
Move cyl_2 up with a yTran of .060.

Apply a Z rotate to cyl_2 of 45 degrees.
Center it on the shaft with an X tran of .030.

Now go into the Object menu for cyl_2 and set cyl_1 as its parent. (Or do it with the Hierarchy Manager, doesn't matter.)

Does cyl_2 go crazy, or not?

If not, and if you also are running under Windows, then there's something wrong with my application, and I'll reinstall.

Anyone reading this and running Poser under Windows is welcome to try the same experiment. (What the heck, try the Mac version too.)

Thanks!

Just a final followup: my problem with creating a smart prop was indeed that I -- ahem! -- followed the manual and always used the "select subset" button, thereby surpressing the smart prop prompt. Thanks, Ajax!

Thanks also for your thoughts about the problem with parented props deforming. For most purposes, I can agglomerate the sub-props via exporting to .obj, no parenting needed, so at least I have a workaround.

But I encounter the problem all the time, whenever the sub-prop has been rotated, and since this would be a well-known and infamous problem if it were happening to everyone, I think I will try your advice, Nyar1athOtep, and do a clean reinstall, something I haven't done in years; maybe there is something corrupt in my version.

Heartfelt thanks to you both for jumping in so quickly to help me think about and solve these problems. It's great to have a community like this at Renderosity.

Hmmmmm . . . Yes, I was using the select subset button.

And yes, the deforming did involve pieces that had been extensively scaled. Maybe I'll export and import them and see if I can wash off their original size before combining them.

Thanks for the good leads, I'll follow them up!

Thanks Nyarl. I'm using the Windows OS. I could certainly reinstall, but so far I want to eliminate the possibility it's my error, not the program's.

Okay, I export it and imported again, and got a single object (which is worth doing for that sake, actually, thanks)-- but it doesn't solve the problem at all. Still no "Do you want to save as smart prop?" dialogue, and the saved prop only restores to the point in space where the figure's hand will be in the figure's default position. (Or is that all a smart prop would do anyway?)

Thanks, Ajax, I'll try that. While we're on the subject, maybe you know something about this, too. Sometimes I can build props out of primitives with no problem at all within Poser, other times I'll parent one piece of the complex and the moment I parent it, it deforms wildly in shape until unparented again. Any idea what the problem is there? and the workaround? Thanks again.

Well, since I first wrote, I have seen the "smart prop prompt" again. If I accidentally try to save the non-parent part of the complex prop (i.e., Rplate in the example above), Poser sees that Rplate has a parent (the shaft) and asks if I want to make it a smart prop. But it still won't ask the smart prop question of a prop whose parent is part of a figure, and of course, it's almost always figures we want to smart prop to. (And I know perfectly well that people smart prop to them every day. And maybe I have, without the prompt. So . . . "smart prop prompt" has not completely vanished from the scene, but I'm still asking all my original questions.)