I'm going to slice up a gorilla I bought on the Infographica CD to make it posable. The groups that came with are all wrong. I need to make it 1 group & start over, making it conformable etc. I have Win98, Cararra, RDS5.5 &5.2, Poser4, Compose, & UV Mapper. I don't know how to subgroup limbs etc yet & need advice as to the best approach & software to accomplish this. Does anyone have suggestions? Regards, Pack

heya; i would open the obj in uvmapper, select all, and assign it to one group to get the single group bit. if, however, you want different materials, i'd make one group for each material. then i would use ray dream (you can probably use carrera, but i dont have that) to re-divide the mesh. just hop into the mesh, select the faces of each piece, and do a selection:detatch polygons. then name polymesh. (give it the group name, ie: lhand rshldr, whatever.) ray dream doesnt support materials (dunno if carrera supports materials, that'd be nice), so i would make each material still a separate group. for example, i'd end up with a group for the head!skin, head!eyes, head!fur; whatever. good luck; it looks like a nice model. :)

Thanks. Making 1 group I know. Its subdividing that I needed, & I'll use the detach command-thanks. As far as the matireal, the Infographica CD model is in .max format, & each matireal 's map will probably need a redo. I will be getting 3DS max soon (ships today) & will investigate how well maps export. I'm not very happy how Poser & Bryce require remapping an exported objects matireal that was already professionally mapped (in .max format). Bongo said he can import the original max file (exported to .obj using Viz) into Vue3 as is. Regards, Pack

sir dean: i use detatch polygons so i can keep track of what poly's have been named and what group they are in. you CAN leave them all attatched (i recommend this if you are getting weird seams when exporting to poser), select each pieces and do selection:name polygons. (you can't name a 'polymesh' unless it is detatched from the rest of the mesh.) now, the trick here is... you can't select your polys, name them, and then turn them invisible and grab the next group, because you will miss some. the same points that make up the top edge of one group make up the bottom edge of the other group, so you have to overlap your selections. which is sometimes hard (especially in complex models) because you can't really see what you're doing. there is no way to tell ray dream to select all the polygons of a certain name. (you can save the selection, though.) anyway, that only pertains to ray dream. dunno how it works in carrera, and i certainly don't know anything about it in other progs. :) also, text editing the obj for groups and materials is fine, too. :) but you would want to search for "!" in my case, and make it-- g head usemtl skin do NOT leave the !'s in the obj you want to import into poser. poser does not understand !'s; it'll flake out.