This is the part of the Setup room figure creation process where you associate (group) bones with portions of the geometry, giving your geometry the ability to bend and move. It is important that you take great care during this step to ensure that your new figure will be able to bend and, just as importantly, bend correctly.
Your geometry consists of many polygons that together form its overall shape. At this point, Poser knows the skeleton, including its joints, parents, and children. It knows that moving one bone will affect its children and may affect the parent, and it knows how each joint should behave. However, Poser does not yet know which polygons need to move for any given movement of the skeleton. To enable your geometry to bend, you must combine logical subsets of the polygons that make up your geometry and group each subset with the appropriate bone.
Where you need to be careful is in being sure that the correct polygons are assigned to the correct bones, that is, the right arm should move when you move the right shoulder bone, and so forth. It is possible to assign any polygon to any bone. You could have polygons in the leg region grouped with a bone in the neck, for example. You could even have random polygons scattered around the geometry grouped with any bone in the skeleton. While you may wish to do this for experimental or artistic purposes, this manual will assume that you are trying to create a realistic figure from the geometry and skeleton.
Now that the skeleton is complete, it is appropriate to think of each bone as a body part. For each such body part, an identically named group of polygons on the geometry must exist. Each of the joints will cause the grouped polygons to bend where parent and child groups touch. Poser knows which polygons to bend by matching the internal name of the bone being moved with the internal name of a group of polygons.
If you are adjusting an existing figure in the Setup room, the necessary body groups will already exist and may already be properly set up.
To create groups, select the Grouping tool, which opens the Group Editor palette. The Grouping tool can select polygons to create a group. Then you can use the Assign Material button to assign a name for the body part for the selected polygons.
As discussed in Importing 3D Objects, your imported geometry cannot have overlapping or duplicated polygons and, if you have created groups when you built the geometry, the polygons in the geometry cannot belong to more than one group at a time.
The Setup room allows you to create figures from a single geometry consisting of ungrouped polygons. This is the recommended method.
There are a number of different ways that you can assign groups to your figures. For example, some assign groups in their modeling application or with other utilities. You can, however, use Poser’s Group Editor to create and assign groups to the polygons in your model. The Group Editor allows you to select polygons manually and then assign them to groups. If your figure does not already have groups assigned, you can also use the Auto Group feature to automatically generate groups based on the bone structure of the skeleton. For further information, refer to The Group Editor for information about using the Grouping tool and the Group Editor palette.
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