A Compendium of PZ2 Techniques.

This thread is aimed at people who have some experience of text editing Poser library files.

It seems that there are questions about pose (*.pz2) files that keep coming up from time to time. Pose files can do much more than just pose a figure. They can hide or lock actors, scale, smartparent, change materials (MAT poses), change joint parameters, inject new geometry into props and actors, inject morphs and ERC, to name a just few things.

I thought it might be useful to have a compendium of pz2 examples in one thread, rather than posting the same answers over and over. In learning about pz2 files you will also learn a lot about how pp2 (prop) and cr2 (character) files work.

Most of the pz2 files in this thread will need to be constructed or edited in a text editor or a cr2 editor, they are not in general things that can be saved directly from the Poser interface. When you do need to save a pose file in Poser as the basis for further editing, make sure you have "Use file compression" turned off in the General Preferences, so that the result is a plain text file. For some pose files relating to morphs it may also be necessary to have "Use external binary morph targets" turned off.

In my pz2 files I usually do not use the colon and actor number (:1), in most cases it does not matter if this is included or not, but in pose files that inject or modify ERC slaving code the ":1" should in general NOT be used, and you should use "Figure" NOT "Figure 1" in most slaving code.

Lines starting with "//" or "#" are comment lines, these lines will be ignored by Poser. All the files I post in this thread have a pz2 file extension unless otherwise stated. Be aware that most pz2 files can be placed in a camera folder if you change the file extntion to cm2, or in a lights folder if you change the extension to lt2, or in a face folder if you change the extension to fc2.

All the pose files I post here have been tested in Poser 6, but there is always a chance that some particular pose will not work as expected in some set of circumstances, or that I have made a typo. I welcome corrections if anyone spots errors in this thread.

Feel free to add your own pz2 techniques to this thread, but please check your work for errors before posting, and post a working example, either as a text attachment (*.txt), or pre-formatted text.

To display pre-formatted text in a post you enclose the code in the HTML 'pre' tags "

" and "

;". When you include pre-formatted text you need to use the "Source" button in the Renderosity "Reply" box, before pasting your text in. Because the "Source" button will change the way text is formatted, you will need to use paragraph tags

to get paragraph breaks in any text that is outside the pre tags.

Enough preamble, in my next post I will give some examples of pz2 files.