Hi folks, I'm stuck and need help!

I have a prop of a small building which features a hanging lamp and various other bits and pieces.  I need to extract the lamp from the rest of the model to re-position it within the scene, but as usual Poser loads the whole building as a single prop.  I note that in the material room, each piece of the moel has it's own material group, so much so that I can make all the other bits of the model invisible within the material room, but find that the invisibilised bits are casting weird artefacts.

Is there any way in Poser to ungroup the polygons in the original model into their component parts, so I could just load the lamp bit?

Assuming this scene is all one OBJ file:  The simplest trick is to use the Grouping tool

1. Click on the grouping tool.

2. Hit the "New Group" button.

3. Call it "lamp" or something.

4. Hit the "Add Materials" button, then select the material zone that belongs to the lamp.

5. At this point your new group will consist of everything with that material zone.

6. Hit the "Create Prop" button.  (Not the "Spawn PropS" button!)

7. Close the Grouping dialog.

8.  Now your Lamp should be a separate prop.  You should be able to select it and

move it like any other prop. 

9.  You can then delete the original scene.

you could select the lamp with the grouping tool and spawn a prop from it then make the materials on the original transparent.

Quote - each piece of the moel has it's own material group, so much so that I can make all the other bits of the model invisible within the material room, but find that the invisibilised bits are casting weird artefacts.

Make sure that the Specular_Value is zero (or that the Specular_Color is absolute black), and that the Transparency_Falloff is set to zero. Failure to do both of those things are common causes of incomplete transparency.

Ockham has given an excellent explanation of how to separate part of the object. At the risk of complicating a simple explanation, I would like to add a suggestion.

Before you do step #7, you can reselect the original prop, then do 'Invert' in the Grouping Tool, then click the "Create Prop" button again. This will give you a prop that contains everything except the previous group (lamp). You can now delete the original prop from the scene. You should now be left with two new props, the lamp in one, and everything but the lamp in the other.

Guys - thanks so  much for these suggestions - I'll give them all a try!

and save themback to the props library if you want to keep them for another scene.