This is going to be an overview of the steps and some of the tricks in turning a completed mesh into a pose-able item that will open in Poser or DAZStudio. It assumes you have some familiarity with Poser, and a general comfort level in crawling inside huge blocks of markup text to make changes. There are many ways to rig Poser items, and many tools that you may be able to use (depending on your platforms of availability); the below is simply the way I am most comfortable with. It is relatively fast, and it gives me the degree of control I prefer. First off -- prop or figure? The way the Poser libraries work, you can place practically anything in practically any folder. The major difference between prop (in the Poser file sense, ) and figure (aka a file ending in.cr2 or equivalent) is that a figure has multiple actors.

Aka, more than one body part. The main advantage of a prop is that it can be smart-propped. That is, it will react to the pose of a selected figure and snap to a desired location on that figure when loaded. This is very handy (pun intended) for knives, bracelets, necklaces. The main disadvantage to a prop is that the only moving parts possible are with morphs.

(There are two other technical issues with props. Alternate geometry channels tend to break. Pose files -- such as used to load textures in one click -- won't apply unless there is a figure also in the workspace.) I build almost everything as figures.

Remix star one episode 100. I PM'd PhilC about this at Rosity, and he told me it was a feature of the new windows updates. But yes it's something in the new poser, though I'm only experiecing it with Tool box, pocket knife was still working for me.

This allows moving parts with rotating motions (which are hard to get with morphs). And the lack of smart parenting is actually not that big a problem; you can build a semi-conforming prop that will 'snap to' in exactly the same way as a smart prop; it only requires the end-user take the second step of conforming the prop to the desired figure. I'll explain more about that trick later. My next preference for props is extensive ERC. In my current set, I have several gear boxes filled with moving gears. Instead of rigging them so the end-user selects each gear and animates it in turn, I have hidden all the individual body parts and presented the end-user with but a single master control channel in the default actor. That master channel operates all the gears, in synchronization.

I tend to dial-clean extensively; I hide all the dials that aren't useful (such as spinning the cylinder of a revolver at right angles to the gun), and re-name the dials that are to be used (such as 'pressure' instead of 'xRot' for the pointer on a gauge.) The main tool to achieve this is a text editor. I also make use of a very nice shareware tool from PhilC called 'Poser Pocket Knife.' It runs in Poser Python right in the workspace. You can do everything in text, but tools like PPK make it faster.

So let's to it. There are essentially four ways to create a new figure. 1) Setup room. I wish I could say more about this, because I don't use it. I can do everything the room offers more accurately and efficiently using other tools. (The Setup Room is really optimized towards humanoid figures and gets a little odd about something like an airplane or a monkey wrench). 2) Donor cr2.

This is the best way to rig conforming clothing. You start with a 'stripped'.cr2 (DAZ makes these available for their major figures). You edit it to point at your clothing geometry. I may go into detail in a later essay.

Create a short text file in a specific format and, within the Poser workspace, use the 'Convert heir file' command. This is a more efficient way to rig custom figures with a large number of body parts -- I used it to create a pose-able moth some time back. 4) Hierarchy Room. This is the method I'll be talking about.

To use the Hierachy Room method, you need to be able to select each intended body part in the Poser workspace. The simplest way to do this is by importing each body part separately; each is then recognized by Poser as a 'prop.' As an example, if you are rigging a pair of pliers, import 'leftArmAndJaw' and 'rightArmAndJaw' into Poser.