I am assigning groups for a model and part of it is a "glove". I'm doing it in UV Mapper because I used Wings to model and it has a weird material/grouping thing that doesn't allow you to label groups in the program (you have to label it as a material, export and then change it to a group) Anyways, if the body parts say "Thumb1, Thumb2, Thumb3" etc, do I need to also divide up the glove Thumb into Thumb1, Thumb2 etc., or can I just call it "Thumb"? or can I just call the whole Thumb, "Thumb1" or "Thumb3"?Will this affect the item's posability? If I have to, I will go back into Wings and divide the fingers up, but it's a pain because then I have to export it and change all the names because Wings adds extra names to the material name.

I'm not sure I understand well your question, so pardon me if I'm off target. For the figure to be posable, you have to have the Geometry divided into as many groups as there are body parts. Hence, you have to have a rThumb1, rThumb2 and rThumb3. For the materials, you can divide your geometry just as you want, and you can keep a group composed of polygons belonging to both hands and called "glove" or "thumb". The borders don't even have to match the bodyparts borders. Just don't give a material group the same name that you gave to a bodypart group. And never use spaces into groups' names. And never ever feed them after midnight. (ah well, forget this one..)

Compiler is correct. The only reason for having groups is so that poser can pose those body parts. If your gloves are going to be posable, you'll need to assign each part to the correct group. For materials, you can divide the model up any way you want. mac

That's kind of what I thought. I guess I didn't explain it very well ;-) I've just discovered that in Wings3d, you can't assign groups and have them export. You can, however, assign materials. So one of the ways around the groups thing is to assign materials in Wings3d that actually correspond with the groups you want, then you can export it to UV Mapper, select by material and then assign it to a group. However, now I'm a bit concerned that you said never assign a material group the same name that you gave to a bodypart group. Why is that?

hey be happy, i use anim8or and it can't even import groups.

You can do what you do now and use the materials to make the groups. Then afterwards in UVMapper use the materials to make the groups and THEN assign new materials, as materials divided into as many groups as there is in a hand would be a royal PITA to texture. I have never heard that you couldn't call a material the same as a group, It's actually common in the HEAD to have both a group named HEAD and a material named HEAD isn't it? But places like the hand would be impractical if they were named as the groups. Perhaps it is something with the r and l thing?

What I meant is that if you give a material group the name "Head" while you have a posing group of the same name, Poser won't know which group to use when calculating the pose. I checked Posette and Vickie and both have a material named skinhead and not head. It might not be a problem if both groups have the same vertices, but I'm not quite sure.

Are the names case-sensitive? In other words, can you have a material named Head with a group named head?

I think they are case sensitive. Most of Poser is. The characters I've made from scratch do (at least in some occasions) have material zones and body parts with the same name. Possibly with different casing though. And in general they do not share vertices (I make the groups in one program (UVMapper) and the material zones usually in Poser, with the grouping tool, as I find it easier to select single polys in Poser as opposed to UVMapper Pro))

Cy, If you assign different materials in wings to separate the fingers and thumb, you can then assign those zones to groups in uv mapper. After you've done that, just assign all the different materials to one single material, like 'hand' or whatever. In other words, what ernyoka said... I don't know if there's a hard and fast rule about using the same names for groups and materials, but I doubt if it's a very good idea. That the sort of thing that's guaranteed to confuse poser. Everything in poser is case-sensitive and poser has it's own weird rules for names. Here's a strange example. I've been making staircases recently and at first, I named the steps part 'stair'. Once I got the figure into poser, I discovered that it changes the name 'stair' to 'Stair' (with a cap) and assigns a shortcut to it by underlining one of the letters. I realised that poser thinks my stair is the Poser Stair Prop and that's why it's doing this. Very weird. Anyway, I just renamed it to 'staircase', so there can be no conflict with the Stair prop. And yes, the head material is usually called skin or skinhead. mac