In the course of customizing the rigging for some figures, I've come to realize just how important the order of listings inside the cr2 Channels block can be. All of the different types of listings should be in certain places. Moving them around can massively alter how a figure handles. Unfortunately we can't rely on Poser to be careful about the order of listings, as we use its native tools to modify our figures. Poser will sometimes plunk morph or joint listings just anywhere at all in Channels, when transferring morphs and joints. This can make a real mess of a figure.

I have attached an image illustrating a problem I recently came across, and its solution. If you have been modifying your figures, or even just transferring joints and morphs, and you begin to see strange problems that can't be fixed with Poser's native tools, you may need to look inside the cr2.

In my case, I added Chest to the actors to be deformed by Head rotations, on a customized Antonia-WM. The picture on the left shows an ugly neck ridge that resulted, when certain Head and Neck rotations were used together. The Neck and Chest vertices were pulling in opposite directions at the actor weld.

I tinkered around a bit with the cr2 and found that the Head joint affectors in the Chest channels block needed to appear before the neck listings, and not after. Poser had placed them after Neck, apparently just plunking them in at the end of the set of all child affector listings.

I'm starting to think the Poser File Editor should just be included with Poser, like Wardrobe Wizard is nowadays. Poser creates for us certain problems, by doing things sloppily inside the cr2, and the resulting messes need to be cleaned up on the file level. But the good news is that they can be fixed.

Great findings and solution

This is great information!!

Interesting stuff relevant to those that use this kind of information.

"I'm starting to think the Poser File Editor should just be included with Poser, like Wardrobe Wizard is nowadays."

I recall suggesting this very thing in a Poser feature request thread about a year ago here (I won't bother linking to that horrible thread), I was promptly labeled a pro Daz troll and called silly by glitterati3d, lol. Think she's banned now? Anyway I agree fully. I use a text editor, which actually has forced me to learn how to manipulate .cr2's to do all kinds of neat tricks. Conjuring PFE or similar within the Poser interface would be an awesome addition to Poser's deep level tool sets.

You might also want to have a look at what ShvrDavid has to say about the processing order of morphs as they appear in a .cr2 and version specific peculiarities. Just copy and paste the link, we are no longer allowed to create direct links.

http://forum.runtimedna.com/showthread.php?103373-Making-a-massive-morph-with-morph-tool-joint-zones-get-messed-up

Interesting thread cage, wish there were more like these.

Bookmarked.

Ooh. That's a good one, EldritchCellar. I'm glad we're at least allowed to post a URL without an active link.

I have run into some situations recently in which morph transfer was placing some (but not all) morphs after the joints. It kept doing this with the same morphs as I worked with a few different figures, as though Poser thought it had a good reason for placing those morphs at the end of Channels. But. Putting those morphs after the joint deformers completely messed up the figures in question. The first time this happened, I spent hours fighting with the joint editor, trying to fix what seemed to be a bad joint transfer. It wasn't bad joints at all. It was badly-placed transferred morphs. Now when I see what I think might be a bad joint transfer the first thing I check is whether any morphs are weirdly placed in the cr2. Heh.

Thank you for this info.

That's Yvonne Craig, isn't it?

WandW posted at 1:21PM Tue, 08 March 2016 - #4259912

That's Yvonne Craig, isn't it?

It is, indeed. Cage is nothing, if not predictable. Heh.

One of these days, I hope to get my updated version of this Antonia character up on my Morphography site. Now that BlueEcho has made the free Antonia-A textures available again, I can do that. One of the troubles with a freebie-driven, communty-based project like Antonia is the tendency of Poser freebies to lose their hosting and become inaccessible to users after a time. I wish Antonia had a reliable, long-term solution. Like the Blender Foundation! The time to try to build an Antonia Foundation would have been 2011, though, I suppose.

Cage posted at 7:59AM Wed, 09 March 2016 - #4259920

One of these days, I hope to get my updated version of this Antonia character up on my Morphography site. Now that BlueEcho has made the free Antonia-A textures available again, I can do that. One of the troubles with a freebie-driven, communty-based project like Antonia is the tendency of Poser freebies to lose their hosting and become inaccessible to users after a time. I wish Antonia had a reliable, long-term solution. Like the Blender Foundation! The time to try to build an Antonia Foundation would have been 2011, though, I suppose.

There is lots of homeless stuff out there. I've got Apollo Maximus, some stuff from Poser Place (I should put Antonia WM there, now that I think of it!) and JoePublic's weightmapped figures on my Google Drive.

What we need is a Free Model Foundation, akin to the Free Software Foundation, which runs the GNU Linux Project...