I haven't spent a lot of time "under the hood" and what I thought I knew jest ain't enough.

I'm trying to use a 574-frame dance pose on a hippo, sorta like Fantasia. The dance works fine with Jessi, so I printed out the Jessi.cr2 header and the Hippo.cr2 header. Compared the two and then used Notepad to "find & replace" so that Pelvis becomes hip, rThighHind becomes rThigh, rHoofHind becomes rFoot, etc., throughout the entire Hippo.cr2 file (and yes, I saved the original in a different location).

Well, there's the good news and the bad news! The good news is that when I load the hippo with the new definitions and the pose, the hippo dances! The bad news is that all the body parts that were renamed are now completely missing from the hippo. They are not just invisible (I looked in the material room) they are not even loaded in. "OK," says I, "Something must need to be changed in the hippo.obj file," but that file has nothing but numbers and no body part names at all. And the texture file appears to be the same for every material that is loaded in, so that's not it.

So then I loaded the original hippo as well and, since all the parts are there, I tried parenting the complete one to the partial one thinking maybe it would drag it along. Nope, that doesn't work. Tried the reverse, nope! Tried conforming, not a chance!

Don't know enough about the Group Tool to know if there is something I can do with it, esp since so many groups are missing, but I guess I could try grouping the toes, heads and tails of both figures together???

 Been at it most of the day with only partial success... 

Anybody ever successfully done something like this? Is there a link to a tut? What's the problem?

All input gratefully accepted!!

TIA,

  
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