When posing movable parts (i.e. open vehicle doors), polys from the main body remain linked to the edges of the moving part and get stretched along. Needless to say it looks terrible.

I've spent the better part of the afternoon fiddling around with surface and material groups, but I found no way to bust the problem. Any ideas would be greatly appreciated.

Best Regards,

Abendwind

You can stop fiddeling ..THAT is not suposed to happen .. 

The fact that the "door post" ? moves is a error in the file and nothing you can do with textures will fix it ..

The part should not move ..and so if it DOES like it shows in your image the tectures will go wonkers ..

So A: your trying to mive something that should not move "not made to move"

or B: get in touch with the make / seller and ask what wrong with it .. and if he/she can fix the model ..

But it has Nothing to do with textures ..

Chris 

If you have a modelling application - and I think you should be able to do this in Blender - select the door (with luck there will be some kind of select by part or group command that will let you pick the whole door part from a list in one go), cut to clipboard and paste back in place then save. The problem is that the mesh is welded in the OBJ and in Poser (and DS3 and earlier) split apart into groups on import, but DS4 doesn't do that any more so any welds in the OBJ remain in the imported model with the result you see.

Thanks for the straightforward suggestion. I had a look at the mesh in blender, and it really seems a fair deal of intensive care there could fix a couple of things. This is also the perfect chance to try and fix some of the messy mesh geometry that came with this particular example...

So well, I suppose there goes another afternoon. ;-)

I seem to remember loading objects with this problem into a version of Poser and saving them out as a CR2/PP2.  The resulting saved version would work in DS correctly.  This re-save trick can also be used to fix some binary morph issues too.   Assuming you have a recent copy of Poser.

Exporting the OBJ from Poser should fix it, since Poser unwelds all aprts and then welds them back together only where the CR2 says (which is why the issue doesn't show there and wasn't caught when the model was made).

Confirmed it works via Poser 9. Thanks for the idea, this is actually a convenient solution!

Before you try messing with the model itself there's another possible problem and solution that could be causing it... if the content creator forgot to turn "bending" off on the parts of the helicopter when it was set up then this will happen (i've had that with my own models when I forget to turn bending off in them)...

Try loading the item, select all of it's various bones in your scene tree and in the properties menu simply turn "bending" option off (on mechanical devices for the most part bending doesn't need to be on)... this may be the source of the issue and takes about 30 seconds to fix without risking changes to the object file...

If turning the bending off doesn't fix it then go with the above suggestions... :)