Page 303 of the Poser 4 manual (the section on making new figures) says you can save parts of poser people (using the save poses dialog - go figure) and then bring them back in and build a new poser figure using the Hierarchy Editor. I tried using the save poses method to save parts of a figure and it didn't work for me - so needless to say I never got to trying to contruct a new poser figure with the saved body parts using the heirarcy editor. Has anyone successfully done this? Or is the manual wrong or confusing? In the mean time I am off to trying Compose to mix and match poser people parts (Betcha can't say that 3 times fast!).

What is Compose? Is it a Poser 4 facility, or a separate program?

Hey there .. To my knowledge the manual is wrong .. Heard this from numerous people as well with the same problem ... Good luck

Anthony, Compose is a utility for working with Poser files, .obj and .pz3. It can be found on the freestuff pages under utilities. It needs the java runtime environment to work. I haven't installed it yet and I have been digging for some tutorials on how to use it. Are there any out there people? I did find some references to using Compose in PhilC's clothing tutorial and on Traveler's Morph world.

One mix and match that I heard of, back before Poser 4 came out, was the top half of the Nude Man on the bottom half of the Casual Man, add a helmet, result is a building site workman with a bare chest as often in hot weather. But he had to do the ocomposing in Bryce.

JKeller has a tutorial posted on combining models with the Compose technique which he credits to JeffH. DRESSING UP YOUR POSER CHARACTERS This relates to combining whole models, so may not work for combining parts of models. Haven't tried it yet so dunno - Ask Jeff?

heya; the manual says you can save body parts somehow in some library. this is not correct. the manual says if you build a figure in the hierarchy editor and click 'create new figure' it will create a new figure. this is, at best, a wild shot. ;) these things just weren't implemented in the actual program. maybe next time. really, the best way i think, is to use another 3d app. (if you have one.)

Thanks for all the info. I have been experimenting with Compose and I have been able to get different body parts into one character. The problem has been lining up the meshes to they are connected properly. Working on that now. I will check out the clothing tutorial for Compose. Compose is a great utility and I highly recommend it for this kind of experimentation.