Sometimes parts of a model are separate groups, not to articulate them in Poser, but so the user can isolate them afterwards in Bryce to texture them in special ways (e.g. transparent or reflective). E.g. in a car with posable doors and wheels and boot/trunk lid and bonnet/hood lid, he might want to chrome-plate the bumpers and the wheel trims (i.e. set them to reflection 80%, diffusion 20% in the Texture Editor). That is far easier done by isolating them as separate groups then by separate extra texture maps. But having the bumpers and the wheel trims as separate joints in the .PHI file would give the attachments of those parts all the unwanted Poser overheads and screen and storage clutter (channels etc) of posable articulations between them and whatever they are attached to, whereas in real life no movement at that joint is possible or wanted. Thus, let this be possible in the .PHI file:- 2 lhWheel xyz 3 lhWheeltrim nojoint and in the CR2 file Poser simply and briefly records those two parts' relative positions and that is all.

Seems overly complex. Why not just use a material? I'm not a big bryce user (deciding after a few hours it was just too different and life was too short) so maybe I'm missing something obvious here. As an aside, you can actually make completely imobile joints and add other such limitations by editing the cr2. This does add about 450 lines and 8.5 kB to the CR2 (per joint), but you can do some fairly cool tricks with it.

But I still need to isolate the wheeltrim or bumper in Bryce to apply the chrome-plate material. And preferably without the overheads of having an unwanted fully developed articulation between e.g. the wheeltrim and its wheel.

Does bryce not offer selections by list of materials, like poser? Or does it want you to try to select the surface with the mouse or seomthing silly like that?

Bryce can select materials from a list. But I still must choose an area to apply that material to, and in Bryce the only sort of area that I can choose to apply a material to is a group or an object or some combintion of these. And when Poser exports to Bryce, each articulating segment becomes a group,

Actually, when Poser exports to Bryce, each Poser usemtl area becomes in own group for the purposes of applying materials in Bryce.

Ok, if that is the case, then you could just create a wheeeltrim material in the obj. That would result in a group that you could apply a chrome surface to. No need to build joints and such.

JKeller wrote "Actually, when Poser exports to Bryce, each Poser usemtl area becomes its own group for the purposes of applying materials in Bryce.". That doesn't happen in my Poser 3. If I export as .OBJ, I get a dialog box "Do you want to export each body part as a group?". "Yes" gets each body segment as a group. "No" gets an exported .OBJ file which contains no "g" lines and no "usemtl" lines anywhere.

I guess that would be Poser4 to Bryce4 interaction. -JH.

You could just set the min and max rotation limits on the dials to 0. That way you get it all now.