Sonovagun. I never even noticed this button. Thanks for cluing me in! DAZ Studio is packed with useful features that I never hear about until someone describes them in a forum like this. Has anyone yet attempted a comprehensive indexed manual gathering all this info in one place?

Thanks for this. You've saved me a lot of work.

Thanks, hborre. Turning off IK did the trick. I confess I never thought of that. Duh.

Thanks! I had no idea this collection existed. Tried some motions and they worked great. It's great that someone put in the immense effort necessary to set up these files.

I had the pleasure recently to attend a reunion where a bunch of the old Poser guys talked over old times. Film at 11. (Full story here.)

Thanks to everyone for all the useful info. Wimvdb's trick did just what I was looking for. Never knew about that one.

Had no idea it'd be this complicated! Those "old school" methods are daunting; much more work than I'm doing copying individual items. I fell back on RedPhantom's method. I put a group of table and four chairs in my prop library and import it into the scene over and over until I have enough tables. I just thought there'd be a quicker way, like in other 3D programs: copy-paste-paste-paste. Ohki, I created a grouping. In the hierarchy editor I dragged a table and four chairs into the grouping. The grouping moved and scaled together. So far so good. Then I chose edit>duplicate grouping 1. A new grouping, Grouping 2, appears but it's empty. I'm sure I'm doing something wrong but I'm not sure what.

Thanks. Disappointing, but at least it wasn't some obvious switch I never learned about!

Yes, that's it. How do you get this effect? I use Poser 11.

Thanks for your responses. I've tried both methods successfully, so that settles it. Still don't know where "wire..." came from. I will blame it on the Wavefront Gremlins.

In Max the material groups were named "table top," etc. And the materials themselves similarly "TableMarble" etc. In Poser's grouping tool panel the Max groups show up with the proper names, but in the material room they have the weird alphanumeric names.

Jfbeute, hanks for laying out the options. I've decided to go for the extra RAM. Even a small boost will be welcome. HarryBart, I'd love to get a nicer computer but the lowest prices I found on dual Xeon machines was around $350, about twice what I have to spend.

Thanks for everyone's help. Sorry I wasn't clear in what I was looking for. What I wanted was this. I set up a figure and set Display/Figure Style to "Flat Shaded Lined." That gave me:

What I wanted was to get the same effect in my render, a shaded white figure with a grid all over. Anyway I discovered the answer and it was ridiculously simple. In render settings I chose the "Preview" tab and the "Render Now (Firefly)" button turned into "Render Now (Preview)." Press the button and I got what I wanted.

If I had just one wish, it would be for Bezier controls on the graph editor.The need to plant extra keys to control a spline shape makes it extra difficult to co-ordinate changes in all three axes of a transform (for example adjusting ease-out of an arm moving in X Y and Z).

Solved! That bit with the shift key is exactly what I was looking for. Thanks!