I have been posing in Poser with dials for years now, for animation and stills. When I first came on board, I thought it was going to be direct manipulation. But after attempting it several times, I got too frustrated by the inability to exactly click on an actor to choose it. But I have never given up wanting direct manipulation.

By default there is IK for leg, and you can turn it on for arms; this at least allows you to grab a hand and move the entire model by pushing an pulling on the hand. It's a pain to go into pull down menus to turn on/off IK.

V4 has a neck/head combo dial. Works great.

Here is the list of such multi-actor controls in V4....

Body 0 CTRLNeckHeadTwist Spline 0.0000 65
Body 0 CTRLNeckHeadSide-Side Spline 0.0000 65
Body 0 CTRLNeckHeadBend Spline 0.0000 65
Body 0 CTRLArmsUp-Down Spline 0.0000 65
Body 0 CTRLArmsFront-Back Spline 0.0000 65
Body 0 CTRLShoulderShrug Spline -1.0000 65
Body 0 CTRLTorsoTwist Spline 0.0000 65
Body 0 CTRLTorsoSide-Side Spline 0.0000 65
Body 0 CTRLTorsoBend Spline 0.0000 65
Body 0 CTRLWaistBend Spline 0.0000 65

Notice that while there are three dials to control neck/head for bend, twist and sidetoside, you still have to make two manipulations (or three) to get the head positioned 'just so."

This is one reason I am falling in love with Carrara...posing by direct manipulation. With an (easy to make) IK connection between head and neck (or whatever!) you just grab the bounding box that appears around the chained actors and  PUT the thing where it should go. Head, neck and even chest rotate and transition together in all directions (not just on the axes). With the IK bounding box selected, you just hit the delete key and the IK chain is gone. Everything stays where you put it.

Also handy as an assist to clicking directly on an actor to select it: right click in the viewport and both the recently-selected actors AND the 'likely' actors in the vacinity appear on a popup....you just slide to the one you want and it is selected.

I have not ever been able to get this workflow to function well in Poser. There is an IK tool in Poser; you have rotate, twist and push/pull tools. Has anyone else been able to establish a workable direct manipulation workflow?

::::: Opera :::::