I'm specifically talking about the modeling aspect of it, so I posted it here.  But yes in the end I want the stuff to be useable in poser.  So this is a modeling/poser question.

When you model clothing, for 3D models - you are suppose to assign the clothing groups that closely match the groups in the model you are creating for.  Correct so far?

So when I go into hex and make the groups, I use the extract command.

Ok so this is the part I don't understand - people say "make sure your groups are welded"  but when I weld things, it will all  become one part.  IE lose all my groups.  To my common sense thinking weld means "join two things together in such a way that they become one".

So are there different kinds of welding?  Because obviously if I weld the groups and they become one group then Poser isn't going to read this thing right and my item will not conform right.  

Now when other people have done this for me, it seems thier groups are not "one thing"  they are more than one aligned perfectly and in such a way that they look like one.  But if I grab the arrow they will move away from the rest.  Pieces made like this work.

What is it that people mean when they say to me to "weld my groups"?

Have I made any sense at all?

Thanks in advance,
Jaci

Quote - When you model clothing, for 3D models - you are suppose to assign the clothing groups that closely match the groups in the model you are creating for. Correct so far?

We're talking about Poser here, I assume. Other modellers will have different requirements... It doesn't have to be that close, actually. I usually try to get mine as close as the nearest polygon, but there's no need to get obsessive about it. One thing you do have to watch, though, is not to have too thin a strip in places like V3's chest, where it passes between the collars. I believe a minimum of three polygons wide is the guideline, but I've never put it to the test myself. The other thing to remember regarding grouping is that you never need the last group in the hierarchy at all. For instance, if you're making boots, you can omit the toe groups altogether. > Quote - Ok so this is the part I don't understand - people say "make sure your groups are welded"  but when I weld things, it will all  become one part.  IE lose all my groups.  To my common sense thinking weld means "join two things together in such a way that they become one".

So are there different kinds of welding?  Because obviously if I weld the groups and they become one group then Poser isn't going to read this thing right and my item will not conform right.  

Poser allows you to do this in two ways; it took me an age to comprehend the reality behind this concept. 1) You can have a completely welded mesh - but this doesn't mean that you can't have groups as well. A group, in Wavefront OBJ terms, is just a way of marking some polygons and giving them a common name. They can be joined together, or not; it doesn't matter. 2) Your body parts can be separate objects. Poser even allows these to be in different geometry files. It will weld the parts together for you, providing that the vertices along the edges which need welding are exactly in the same place; to the final decimal place. This is where stuff made in some modellers falls down, because they lose a little precision during the import/export process. Because the vertex positions are no longer identical, they don't get welded - and the mesh tears during bending. > Quote - What is it that people mean when they say to me to "weld my groups"?

Here's how I would do it: open your mesh in UVMapper. Make a note of the number of vertices, that the statistics dialog will show you. Then weld vertices. Hopefully the number of vertices will now be less; if not, either the mesh didn't need welding in the first place, or some inaccuracies have crept in so the vertex positions are no longer exactly coincident. If not, this may be fixable in yur modeller, but I don't know Hex well enough yet to offer advice. > Quote - Have I made any sense at all?

Have I? I hope that helped, if not, hit that reply button...

It does help EnglishBob, thank you.  I'm one of those people that always has to know "why" in order for stuff to make sense to me.  (drove my mother nuts).

So you're reply did alot to make some sense of the process to me.  I think my problems before have then been that I did not have these Polys aligned properly so the weld in poser was failing.
think being the important word there.  

The tip about what to do in UVmapper will prove useful I'm sure.

I appreciate the reply - I am saving this page.
Thank you,
Jaci

No problem, glad we're on the same wavelength. For what it's worth, I always model a complete welded mesh, and then assign groups in an application that I know isn't going to mess things up for me. This is usually AutoGroup Editor, followed by tidying up in UVMapper Pro, neither of which will split the mesh in any way. In the past I assigned groups using nothing but UVMapper Classic, which is tedious but perfectly possible.

Yeah Connie recommended that I don't do the groups in the modeling program.  I like to be hard headed though : /  
I did try doing it in UVmapper, but I can't get my head around the selection methods in that program, I hate it.  So far AutoGroup Editor works for me.  The Ultimate tool kit is on sale this week too, might get that.

okcrandy from CP apollo forum helped me a ton with the boxers.  Now the plan is to use the base he created and begin to understand things.  Hey it's a plan...

I don't know hexagon; but is it possible to make your groupings without extracting?
Seems like an extra step in there...Extract (breaking the verts apart), then weld (putting them back together).
The groupings; AFAIK, are based on Material assignments; at least they are for what I render w/. Whether the groups are part of the same mesh or not is unimportant. Groups can span several objects and/or several groups can share the same object.
I usually go with welded mesh for 'organic' objects that need to have smooth transitions in the mesh and seperate objects where there needs to be a 'hard edge' between meshes. Might be different in Poser.

You may want to take this to the Poser forum for clarification.  If you open a cr2. file and do a search for 'weld' you side be taken to  a bunch of lines (usually near the end of the file) that tells what parts should be welded to what other parts.

Attached Link: What's in an OBJ.

Doing it the HARD way. Part 1 The first step to understanding what Poser does is to understand the OBJ file format. The link above is the actual one I think I first found in 1999 when I started making content for Poser 3. (Back in this "Jurrasic" Poser period.) :-p In those days you couldn't count on any program to put out correct OBJ info. I was using Lightwave 4 or 5 I belive and it had NO clue what the g command in an OBJ file was. Or a UV map. It did however export LW Surfaces as Materials to OBJ. Through some naming tricks and text editing I was able to get a solid welded mesh into into poser with grouping in tact. Lightwave 7.5 finnaly out put a proper OBJ with grouping AND materials defined properly, so I forgot what I used to do exactly, but it was something like naming the material groupname_surfacename which came out in the OBJ text as... usemtl groupname_surfacename Then I could do a 2 pass search and replace. Turing all the "usemtl" to "g" and then turning all the "_" into a "[Carrige Return]usemtl[space]". This let me use surfaces to define body parts and gave me a solid figure that Poser could load, with grouping, and Materials. It should still work if you can define materials in Hexagon.

Doing it the HARD way. Part 2 The second step was learning to read a CR2 file. These days it's much easier since you have tools like CR2 Editor 1.5 to read the file for you. But... as jestmart ponted out, there is a command in the CR2 that tells Poser to weld the groups together. The problem is, if verts at the edge of the two groups are not in exactly the same space down to .00001 or something like that... they WON'T WELD! This is why it's functionally impossible to load seperate peices into Poser an build a solid figure from them. No matter how close you get them by eye, the slightest offset ruins the CR2 weld. So you see, there are actually 2 "weld" commands when dealing with Poser content. The vertices that are welded in the modeler and exported to the OBJ and the Poser CR2 command. Also, turning off bending seems to break the welds. To make matters worse, Poser has issues with welding more than 3 groups together. THis is why I could never make a decent skirt back in those days, and why my dragon wings still won't work. Although I was recently looking at the super low res Poser 3 legacy figures and noticed that the L and R collar are welded down the center, and the neck is welded to them! I have to tear into the CR2 to see if they were doing anything special. This is basically a long version of what everyone else has said. The way to learn is to start loading OBJ's and CR2's into a decent text editor. If you can do a decent HTML page, you should have little trouble learning to CR2 and even OBJ hack. Your other option is to fire off a request to Hexagon's developer and tell them to implement proper OBJ support. I complained for 3 years until LW got it right.