Are there any Tutorials on how to properley rig vehicles and the like? All I have managed to find refer to humanoids. Also any links to setting up ERC. I thought I bookmarked an informative site I found but I can't find it anymore. Any pointers gratefully accepted

Here's one that deals with rigging a sliding door: Creating Poser characters The original ERC tutorials are at Right Side of the Brain and Nerd3D. Hope that helps, I'm sure there will be others...

Well, let's use a car as an example..

First load all the parts that will have seperate movement as individual obj's. wheels, doors etc, and parent them to the main body of the car. (i.e. the body will be the parent and the moving parts will be the children.

If you have an extended hierarchy like moving door handles, they would be parented to the door and the door to the car body and so forth.

WHen you have everything parented, open the Hierarchy Editor and select the parent item. Click "Create New Figure" ,, it will then be listed in the "New Figures" library.

Delete the current prop assembly and load the new figure you just created.

In the Properties window, UNcheck the "Bend" tic box for all the parts.

You then need to open the Joint Editor and move all the "Center Points" and "End Points" into the proper positions so the parts will rotate correctly.

Resave the figure or save as a new figure in the Library of your choice.

As for the ERC, the only way I know is by editing the cr2 in text. ockham is pretty sharp on that stuff, maybe shoot him an IM or perhaps he'll wander in and post some info.

If you're starting from a single OBJ, the "Helgard Method" of rigging a 
non-organic item goes like this:

1. Get the object scaled and located properly first, and be sure each 
   desired body part is a Group (g) in the object.  

2. Load the scaled obj in Poser.

3. Click on the Grouping tool, and hit the "Spawn Props" button in the grouping panel.
   This will separate all groups into individual props.

4. Hit the Delete key to eliminate the original.

5. Open the Hierarchy window and set up your parenting, using the
   logical structure of the vehicle.  The top item should generally be the
   chassis or body.  (Be sure you name the body something other than
   'BODY' though; call it mainbody or something like that.)

6. Select the top item and hit "Create Figure".

7. At this point you have a raw figure in the New Figures folder.  You'll
   need to edit the CR2 to change all 'bend 1' to 'bend 0', and you'll need
   to fiddle endlessly with the materials, of course.

A couple of helper scripts:

http://ockhamsbungalow.com/Python/CR2%20Helpers/makefurn.zip

MakeFurn changes the Bend in a cr2 and also strips out all the stuff
you don't need for a non-organic furniture or vehicle item.

http://ockhamsbungalow.com/Python/CR2%20Helpers/centerAndReplace.zip

CenterAndReplace locates the true "physical" center of wheels and
rewrites the origin.  This is needed because Poser's figure-create action
assumes everything is a critter with limbs, and puts the origin of all
parts where it would be on a leg or arm.

BMK....Finally i understand ERC, there was me think the master controlled the slave,getting annoyed and giving up,lol.... now i know the slave is the control... now to have me some fun...lol

One note about moving the center and end points. The term "Center Point" may be a bit counterintuitive in a sense. I think "Pivot Point" would probably describe it more accurately. 

For example, the door of the car. The "Center Point" would actually need to be at the front end of the door where it hinges to the car body while the "End Point" would be at the opposite end of the door that swings wide.

Just keep in mind that the Center Point is the center of rotation for that object or part.

Thanks all for the info. Plenty of stuff to be getting on with there. Just one thing I would like to clear up though. Does the 'Create new figure' create or place the bones automatically with the groups?

Quote - Does the 'Create new figure' create or place the bones automatically with the groups?

Yes it does.

Thanks

A few other things with rigid body rigging:

Turn off polygon smoothing.
If you have the feature in UV mapper or your modeller, split the vertices.
Remember to add limits. 

Easypose Underground is highly recommended if you are doing many figures, it saves hundreds of hours of tedious work. 

Another thing that comes up with mechanical figures, and that makes comfort with hand-editting the cr2 a good thing to have: To create a sliding movement the best thing is to un-hide the appropriate translate dial. Me, I like to not just rename the dials I really want to use (switchOn, turnKnob, etc) but hide all the dials that aren't going to be used for that figure. It's a simple edit in the cr2. Set "hidden" to a value of 1 or 0, as needed. Lately I've been using altGeom in conjunction with the other methods (joints, morphs) to add more possibilities to a mechanical figure. On ERC -- the slave dial follows the master. They can stack indefinitely (as long as you don't accidentally set up a loop!) and any or none of the dials may have an innate function. Which is to say; create an "empty" dial named "Focus," now slave two dials two it; one translates the front lens of the camera, the other is a morph for the bellows in the lens tube. And if you wanted you could slave yet another dial to that morph, and so on, ad nas. The ERC code isn't bad to insert by hand in text editing, but "Easypose Underground" (PC only) will make it easier.