Hi all, I hope someone has an answer to this, because the Poser 4 manual doesn't seem to provide enough information. I am trying to combine two characters (an animal head on a human body). I brought both characters into the work space, made all the animals parts invisible except the neck and head, made the human neck and head invisible and set up a parent-child relationship (neck of animal to hip of human, so when human bends, neck and head of animal follow.) As TWO characters, that works. I have a human with an animal head. I can pose the human, and the animal head and neck follow it. Except it is really easy to grab a hidden body part of the animal when trying to pose, and the body circle is way off the figure, so rotating it is very confusing! It rotates around some unknown center I can't even guess at. Anyway, according to page 303 of the Poser 4 manual, one is supposed to be able to combine multiple figures into a single new figure. This seemed ideal. After setting up the parent-child relationships (which I did), I should be able to click on the "create figure" button in the hierarcy editor. Except the button never lights up for me to use it! I tried clicking on different body parts in the editor, and sometimes the button lights up, but only briefly, or if it does light up and stay lit, when I click on it, I get nothing. Thinking it must be IK chains, or some other thing I don't understand, I tried it with two human characters, using the basic casual man and woman. I did the same relationships as in my animal attempt, with the hierarchy editor still behaving badly. I did actually get it to work when I clicked on one body, and the create figure button lit, and it let me specify a new character name. The combined character appeared in the library, but when I loaded it into the workspace, all I got was hair! I am thinking either my program is totally bugged, or the manual is wrong. Do any of you know a way to make this work? Thanks!

mae the figure a mesh, not parenting to the other, try using program like max, lw or c4d to combine the two, and export obj. in Propack, use setup to align bones, so you get a posble figure like p4 dork. your present pairs are suitable for still image manipulation.

Spawn props of all the visible body parts. Don't move them. Delete the original human and animal figures. Now assemble them in the hierarchy editor. Parent the animal neck to the human chest. Then the create new figure option should now be available.

Another option which will save time setting up the joint parameters is to export the visible body parts as a single OBJ. Export with the Weld and Body Part Names options selected. Now edit the human CR2 to load this new hybrid.

Wow! Phil just gave us the world's fastest tutorial! Good job! I think I finally understand this now. Thanks Phil!

Thkas everyone for your help.