01

Character Creation: Modeling and Preparation

This document covers considerations and preparation of models to be imported and rigged in Poser Pro
as follows:

Polygon Management, UV Mapping, Assigning Materials.

Download the support Runtime for this tutorial here. This runtime contains all of the files
needed to follow this tutorial.

Creating a character for use in Poser Pro can be a daunting task but compared to other applications, is
fairly easy. Regardless of your modeling method (box modeling, spline modeling, edge extrusion,etc.),
there are a number of things to consider when building a character for use in animation and specifically
Poser Pro. This tutorial will give you an understanding of the required steps.
Requirements: Poser Pro is required, download the Nathan character runtime here.

Polygon management
Even a simple character should have polygons flowing roughly with the shape of the muscles. This helps
in achieving believable movement and also makes the character easier to rig. In addition to creating the
polygons so they flow along the musculature of the body you must also take into a count the areas that
will be bending when rigged and more specifically the areas that will have the most extreme bends such
as elbows, thighs, shoulders and knees. These areas should contain more edge loops to achieve a
smoother bend in the rigging, otherwise your character will seem blocky when posing. There are any
number of theories as to which pose to use as a starting point but for Poser Pro it is recommended that
human characters be placed in a T pose, with palms facing down. This is the most neutral pose in the
range of motion of the body. Again, this will aide rigging the character later on and also decrease oddity
when bending.

UV Mapping
The model should be UVmapped and, in some cases textured, before attempting to rig it for Poser
because the rigging process in Poser requires you to split the mesh into body part groups and this will
create group seams in the mesh which could break apart during the UV mapping process. Doing so will
make texture mapping more consistent and minimize the amount of groups you'll have to deal with. But
there are cases in which you do not want to start your texturing until after the rigging is done. The
reason for this is that if you find in your rigging process that you need to alter the geometry and re-do
the UV mapping then you will not want to have textures already created. The majority of Poser figures
utilize multiple maps (ie. separate maps for head, body, teeth,etc.). Nathan does also but it's not a
requirement of the program. This is done to allow more texture detail in various body parts. So, if you
want the character to appear directly in front of the camera for extended periods of time, the texture
will not appear extremely blurry if you create multiple maps where important objects utilize as much UV
space as possible.

Nathan's Body UV's

In some ways, this is more important than the actual template size, which can vary from body part to
body part depending on importance. For example, a map for an iris shouldn't be larger (or as large as)
the map for the face. That's just a waste of detail, as it won't be seen on so small an object unless it's
very close to the camera. While it may be beneficial to have multiple maps, there are a few difficulties
using them can bring up. For one thing, it will make it that much harder to match up texture seams over
a single object like the body, which may take up more than one map. It will also mean that you'll have to
treat each uv map as separate objects when attempting to use them in applications like ZBrush, where a
single map is preferred instead of multiple maps because multimaps overlap in some 3D paint
programs, but not all, causing distortion . Programs like BodyPaint 3d and DeepPaint will allow you to
paint on a mesh that has overlapping UVs (multiple maps) as shown below and export each map out. A
single UV map, containing all objects without overlapping, can be used without difficulty but can have
a loss of detail in areas like the face when compared to a multi-map setup. Then again, this also depends
on the skill of the texture artist. Ultimately, how you decide to map your model is up to you, just keep in
mind the pros and cons of the various approaches and you should be fine.

Example of Overlapping UV's

Assigning Materials
Assigning materials to your character is a good idea because it allows you to apply different material
settings to parts of the character without affecting the rest of the character. An example of this would
be if you wanted to create a highlight on the fingernails but didn't want that same shininess to effect
the rest of the body. It is also a good practice to have the materials assigned prior to bringing the
character into Poser to start the grouping and rigging process. This is because having the materials
assigned before will aid in setting up your groups in Poser. This process will be demonstrated in the
grouping section. You can assign materials either using your modeling application or in a UV mapping
program like UV Mapper. For a human character you can make materials such as Head, Body,
Fingernails, Eyelashes, Tongue, Teeth, Eyeball, Iris, Pupil etc. Again, having these different material
groups will allow you to quickly and easily change the settings without effecting the rest of the figure. A
complete demonstration will be given in the material room section of the tutorial.

Material Assignment

Closing
Once you have correctly modeled the character and added proper UV Mapping you should proceed to
importing and grouping the character.

02

Creating Your Own Poser Characters

Requirements: Poser Pro is required.

Poser makes it easy to create your own Poser based characters. There are new tools that make the
whole process much easier and quicker than it was before. Creating your own figures and characters is
such a rewarding process; it really is worth the relatively short amount of time it will take you to learn
how to do it. While learning how to create your own figures is a fairly quick process, you can spend the
rest of your life mastering it. That's where the art comes in. The Poser Pro Pack is a must have for this
sort of work and I highly recommend it to anyone interested in creating their own Poser figures and
characters.
I recommend that you follow along with the examples in the rest of this tutorial, and take the time
explore the options. All of the examples I use in the rest of this tutorial will assume you have Poser 4
and the Poser Pro Pack installed.
What's Involved?
There are a few steps involved in creating a custom Poser figure. The basic process is:

Create, purchase or otherwise acquire a 3D model

Import the model into Poser Pro Pack
Add bones to the model
Adjust groups, hierarchy, rotation order and other parameters
Save the model as a Poser figure

The Source Model

The first step is to create a model that you would like to use as a Poser character. You can use just about
any 3D modeling program that you feel comfortable with. Poser Pro Pack imports a wide range of file
formats, including Wavefront OBJ, 3DS, DXF and Lightwave LWO. Just about any modeler worth its salt
will export 3D geometry in one of those formats, and if you're thinking about making your own Poser
character you are probably already familiar with its modeling tools.
While Poser will import many different file formats, there are advantages to working with Wavefront
OBJ files over the other formats. Poser uses Wavefront OBJ as its native file format; in other words, a
Poser figure's geometry is stored as an OBJ file. Also, you can create a UV Map for your figure's OBJ file,
to use when applying color, bump and transparency maps.

So Just What is a Bone?

By now you are probably already painfully aware of how complex a 3D model can become. Trying to
move all those polygons into pose after pose would amount to a whole lot of work and take more time
and patience than most of us have available. Bones are a way to animate a complex 3D mesh in a much
cleaner and simpler way.
Think about your own arm for a moment. You know there are bones inside of your arm to which all your
muscles, flesh and skin are attached. If you move one of your arm bones, everything attached to it will
also move, following along with the same motions that the bone takes. This works the same way for
bones in Poser. You create a series of bones inside of a 3D model that you wish to animate within Poser.

You then assign those polygons of the model nearest to each bone to be "grouped" with that particular
bone. When you move a bone, the polygons of the model that are grouped to that bone move along
with it, just like your own arm.
Bones make the whole animation process much easier. Bones are what allow you to simply select the
"shoulder" of a character and drag with your mouse to move the whole arm into a pose. When you are
working in the Poser room the bones will not be visible. You can only see and edit bones while working
in the Setup room. While assigning bones to a model, you also set up a hierarchy for the bones.

How does the Hierarchy Effect Bones?

A character's bone hierarchy determines how the bones relate to each other. Remember that old song;
"the thigh bone's connected to the leg bone. The leg bone's connected to the knee bone." It goes
something like that. If you were creating bones for a human character, you would tell Poser that the
foot bone is connected to the chin bone, the chin bone is connected to the thigh bone, the thigh bone
to the hip bone. These connections are expressed as "Parent-Child" relationships. Basically, the bone
farther up the chain is the Parent and the one that is dependant upon that Parent is the Child. If you
move a Parent bone, the child bone will move also. This is a good thing when we are talking about
animating something like the human leg. If you pivot the hip bone forwards and up you would expect
the rest of the leg to move in the same direction. It certainly would be unsettling to find that the rest of
your leg detached itself every time you moved your hip!
You will probably have several parents and several children all in the same model, and one bone can be
both a parent and a child at the same time. For instance, if you created a bone in a character's chest and
then another bone in the character's shoulder, the chest would be the parent and the shoulder would
be the child. But if you then created an arm bone, it would be the child and the shoulder would be the
parent. Confusing? Maybe at first, but it all becomes much clearer when you look at the Hierarchy
visually, which is exactly what the Hierarchy Editor is for.
This is what the hierarchy for the P4 Nude Male looks like:

In this window, the hierarchy is somewhat collapsed to show a more basic view. The "Body" with the
little figure standing to the left of it represents the P4 Nude Man. You can see that the Hip, Right Foot
and Left Foot are children to the Body because they are below and indented. By clicking on the little +
icon next to a line in the hierarchy you will tell Poser to display all the body parts (bones) that are
children to that parent. Expanding this hierarchy a little we see:

The Hip has a whole series of children under it, each indention representing a new Parent-Child
relationship.
Explore a few of the standard Poser models to see how the hierarchies work and what they are
comprised of. You will probably be surprised at just how complex some of these models really are.
Spending some time studying existing models will help you understand how Poser characters are laid
out, valuable knowledge when you start to make your own figures!
For more information on hierarchies, consult Chapter 14, "Hierarchies" in your Poser 4 Manual. The
Poser Pro Pack User Guide also contains valuable information about hierarchies, and using the Hierarchy
Editor to create IK chains (Inverse Kinematics chains).

Final Adjustments
After boning and grouping your model you will need to adjust the joint rotation order and joint limits.
The joint rotation order specifies how the joints between the bones will move. This helps you pose your
figures body parts reliably. Joint limits are used to restrict the range of motion for a particular joint. For
instance, your knee does not allow your chin to move forward from a straight vertical alignment with
your upper leg, only backwards away from your body. You can set limits for the joints on your model to
help mimic real life restrictions and assist you in more accurately posing your model.
For more information, refer to the Poser Pro Pack User Guide, "Setting up a Poser Figure", Step 5:
Assigning Rotation Order and Step 10: Setting Joint Limits.

Let's look at a typical scenario for creating a new Poser figure.

Create a Model
Knowing that a tutorial about modeling characters could fill volumes of books, I'm going to take a leap
of faith and assume you have already created, purchased or otherwise acquired a 3D model that you
would like to turn into a Poser figure.
If you don't yet have any characters of your own that you have created, you could download a figure
from one of many resources available on the web. A great place to start is:
3D Caf, offering a large selection of human, animal and other characters and parts for free.
If you have modeled a figure yourself, you will want to make sure you have a single mesh model with no
overlapping geometry. Refer to the section "Importing Geometries" in the Poser Pro Pack User Guide,
page 43, for detailed information on prepping models for import. I would suggest starting out with a
fairly basic model while you try out the figure creation tools in Poser. Trying to bone a complex highresolution human model will surely prove frustrating to most of us when starting out. Rest assured that
once you get the hang of creating a simple Poser figure, the same processes apply to the more complex
ones.

Import the Model

Open Poser and clear the Pose room. You don't want any other figures or props present when you
import your model.
From the "File" menu select "Import" then choose the format you are using. In this example, I am
selecting a Wavefront OBJ file called "Rabbit.obj". Click "Open".

You will be presented with the "Prop Import Options" screen. Click on "Place Object on Floor" to ensure
your model is not floating in the air. You can also enter a value in the "Percent of standard figure size"
box to scale your model during import. The standard figure refers to the P4 Nude Male, which the
manual states to be around 6 feet tall. In this example, I am importing a model that will become a
stuffed bunny toy for children-sized characters, so entering "30" in the "Percent of standard figure size"
box will make the rabbit about 30% the size of the standard Poser male figure. If we set him on the
ground, my rabbit's ear tips will come up to about the P4 male's knee's, which should make him a nice
big rabbit for our kids to hold onto.
Click "Ok" to continue and Poser imports your model. This may take a few moments depending upon
the complexity of your model and the speed and ram of your computer. My imported rabbit is now
displayed in the Pose room.

Your model may be facing away from the front camera, as my rabbit is. I can fix this easily by setting the
"Y Rotate" value to 180 degrees.

Moving into the Setup Room

Click on the "Setup" tab in the upper right corner of your screen. You will be greeted by the message:

This screen is telling you that your model is going to be adjusted a bit so that Poser Pro Pack can work
with it to make it a figure. This is what we want. Click "Ok" to proceed. Take some time now to adjust
your view so your model takes up the entire view window. It is often good to start with the single, headon view by pressing the top icon in the row of icons to the left of your view window.

This is where I will begin to place bones in our rabbit. We are going to start making bones for our rabbit
by using the "Bone Creation Tool". You can find this tool on the far right side of the floating tool palette.

Click once to make it the active tool.

It is important to choose carefully where we place our first bone because this will become the Parent
bone for all the other bones we are about to create. Later, when we are posing our rabbit for use in a
scene, this is the bone that we will select when we want to move, scale or adjust the entire body at
once. For this model it's probably best to put the first bone in the chest. The chest is the center of the
model, and while the chest of this figure will not move itself, we will want to move/pose every part of
the model around the chest, so this makes it the best candidate for a starting point.
To place the first bone, I put the point of the Bone Placement Tool right in the middle of the rabbit's
neck, just under the chin. Left-click with the mouse and hold, then drag straight down until reaching a
spot just under the bottom of the arms. The bone takes shape as the mouse drags. Release the left
mouse button when you are done dragging.

Note: Your model might change to a big colored box while you drag, which will make it hard to tell how
far you have dragged. This is ok because you can adjust the beginning and end points of the bones later.
In fact, you can be assured that you will need to!
Now I will make a bone for the body. With the Bone Placement Tool still selected, move the cursor over
the bottom tip point of the bone just created in the chest. The bone will highlight when the mouse is
over it. Starting from that point, click and drag again to draw out another bone, this time pulling straight
down and ending just before the bottom of the rabbit.

Now we will make a bone for the head. The Bone Placement Tool will automatically make the last bone
you created the parent to the next one you create. In most circumstances this is very handy, but in this

case it would present a problem. We want to create a bone for the head and have it's parent be the
chest bone, not the Lower Body bone. Click to select the "Translate/Pull" tool from the tool palette,
then click once to select the first bone created in the chest. This makes the chest bone the currently
active bone, so the next bone created will be parented to it. Reselect the Bone Placement Tool. Locate
the top point of the first bone you created in the chest, and using it as a starting point
Now is a good time to take a moment to fix up the bone placement to make sure they are where we
want them. Use the Translate/Pull tool to select a bone, then hover over one of the end points and you
will see the cursor turn into two black circles.
When you see the cursor change, left-click with your mouse and hold, then drag the point to where it
should be.

Naming the Bones

Now that we are getting a few bones in our model, lets take the time to name them so we can properly
identify them later. Select the first bone we made in the chest. Press Command/Control+I to open the
"Element Properties" window, or select the "Object" menu, then "Properties".

Among other options, you will see "Internal Name" and "Name". Internal name refers to the name
Poser uses to keep track of the bones and their relationships to one another. You will see these names
appear in the Hierarchy Editor when you work with it later. If you are creating a human figure there are
advantages to naming these bones with the same naming structure that they standard Poser models
use. (Refer to Manual) This lets you use some of the cooler Poser tools like the Symmetry functions and
the walk editor. IF you are just starting out with figure creation, I suggest leaving these names alone
until you feel more comfortable with the entire process of boning and character creation. You are free
to change the Name value right away. What you enter here is what Poser will use to show you the
names of body parts in the pose room. It's best to name these with obvious names that need no
explanation, something that will make sense to you later. For this bone, change the "Name" to "Chest"
and click "OK".

I repeat this process for the other two bones, naming them "Head" and "Lower Body".

Bony Little Arms

We want our rabbit's arms to move similar to a human, bending at the shoulder and the elbow. We
should be able to accomplish this with only two bones. Once again, be sure to select the chest bone to

make it the currently active bone. Then use the Bone Placement Tool to drag out two new bones in the
right arm (the rabbits right, not yours).

Use the Translate/Pull tool to adjust them to your liking.

At this point you would reselect the chest bone, then make two more bones in the rabbits left arm. If
you do forget to reselect the chest bone first you may wind up with some pretty strange bones pointing
in unpredictable directions. This is because Poser is trying to make the last bone you created (the
currently active one) the parent. When that bone is on the other side of the model from the one you are
creating, Poser will do its best to connect them, resulting in unwanted bone placement. Don't worry if
you make a mistake (and you will!). You can always delete a bone by clicking on it to select it and then
pressing "Delete". You can also move the points in the bone back to where you want them if they end
up moving to an unwanted location.

More Bones
Eventually I will go on to add even more bones to this rabbit. Probably three bones in each ear, all
parented to the head bone. This will ensure that when I move the head the ears come along with it,
moving as you would expect them to. If you instead parented the ear bones to something other than
the head bone, you could see some really unpredictable and undesirable results when you did move the
head. I will probably use two bones in each of the legs. This will give me enough control to move the
legs a little, but since this is a stuffed toy rabbit the legs don't need to actually move enough to reflect
locomotion as a real rabbits legs would.
After placing bones in the front view, you will want to view the model from another view, say the side
or top. This will let you align the bones more precisely in all dimensions. I moved to a right camera view
window to move the ear bones of my rabbit. After placing them in the front view they were all lined up
vertically right on top of one another. You can see from the image below that my rabbit's ear is actually
curved a bit forward. I used the Translate/Pull tool to move the three ear bones into position within the
ear.

One of my favorite new features of the Poser Pro Pack is its new multi-view window. Use any views you
need to create and arrange your bones. I prefer to build bone structures from the front view first, but,
depending upon your model and working style, other arrangements may work better. If you have a big
enough monitor, it's also handy to be able to see several different views at the same time.

How many bones to add?

How many bones you add to a model will depend upon what you want to do with it. In the case of my
stuffed toy bunny I only need a few bones. I want the arms to move enough to represent a hug. The
head should be able to flop around to all sides. The stomach area of the rabbit should bend a little, to

look like it is squashing when a child hugs the rabbit. The ears I would like to be very expressionate, so I
am going to put three bones in each ear rather than the two I put in the arms and legs. Three bones will
give me much more resolution, allowing a larger range of motion for the ear than one or two bones
would provide.
Be careful not to go overboard though. The more bones you add to a model the more complex it will
become. You should assess the intended use of the model and then bone accordingly. For example, my
little rabbit has no fingers so two arm bones is enough. But the Michael and Victoria models from DAZ
3D each have the full 5 fingers you would expect to find on a human hand, as well as some added
functionality at the wrist and hand. A complex hand by itself could have more bones in it than my whole
rabbit does!

Using Someone Else's Bones

There is more than one way to bone a rabbit! You don't have to create your own bone structures from
scratch. You could import the bones from another model instead, arrange them within your model, and
group them. This could save you a lot of time, especially when you are working with a model that is
similar to ones you may have already created. If you created a human character, you could use the
bones from one of the standard Poser characters, such as the P4 man or woman. This would greatly
speed up your figure creation process and give you a similar posing experience with your custom figures
to the one you have with the standard Poser characters.
To use a bone structure from another figure you follow the same steps you would use to import that
character in the Pose room. Open the tray located on the right side of your screen. Select the figure
who's bone structure you want to use, and then add them to the scene. As long as you are in the Setup
room only the figure's bones will load, not the whole figure's geometry.
Once the bones are loaded, use the tools and views to place the bones appropriately inside your model.
More about Bones
While I hope you now have a good understanding of what bones are and how to work with them what I
have provided is really only an overview. To learn more precisely how to create and work with bones
you should refer to the Poser Pro Pack User Guide.

Grouping Your Model

After you are satisfied with a set of bones in your model, the next step is to group the bones to the
geometry. Basically, a bone will be assigned a set of polygons in the model, which it will effect when
moved. If you move that bone it will drag the polygons in its group along with it. Poser Pro Pack offers a
very cool tool called the "Grouping Tool".

Selecting this tool will open up a new palette with many options. Click on the "Auto Group" button
toward the bottom of the palette and Poser will take its best guess and assign polygons from the model
to the various bones you have created. While Poser does a pretty good job of setting your figure groups
up, it will inevitably make some choices that you might not have. Fear not, for you can use the Group
Tool to reassign polygons to new groups later. First you will want to close the Group Palette, exit the
Setup room and return to the Poser room to test out your new figure!
Click on any of the body parts, then adjust the controls to pose the character. Congratulations, you have
created your own Poser figure!

Fine Tuning the Figure

It probably didn't take you long to find some problems with your new figure while working with it. Most
likely you will see some tearing and bending in the mesh as you move body parts, or some groups that
contain polygons from area's of the body not directly related. Notice the tearing of the mesh I found
when moving my rabbit's head.
Problems like this one could be caused by groups that don't contain enough polygons to bend
accurately, or even possibly a model that just doesn't contain enough geometry in that area to bend the
way you want it to. If the model needs more detail added, you will have to return to you're modeling
program and start this figure creation process over again after the problems have been corrected. But
you can also return the model to the Setup Room and make adjustments to the groups. In fact, you will
almost always want to do this after using the Auto Group tool.
When back in the Setup room, once again select the Grouping Tool. The pop up menu at the top of the
Group Palette lets you select from all of the bones in your model. Select the bone whose group you
want to edit and you should see all the polygons in that group highlighted in red on your model.
Here I have selected the head bone/group on my rabbit.

Notice how many of the polygons on the side of the head have been assigned to something other than
the head group? They are probably assigned to the lower ear group/bone. I will need to fix that by
reassigning those polygons to the head group. Otherwise that area of the head will deform when I move
the ears! Not something my rabbit would appreciate.
When you use the group tool you are basically choosing a group to work with and then using the group
tool and your mouse to select polygons to add to the current group. The group tool works like a
marquee selection tool from a graphic editing program. You left-click and hold, then drag out a
rectangular selection. When you let go of the left mouse button, anything within that selection turns
red and becomes part of the currently selected group.
I used the group tool in the front view to add some polygons.

You notice that the green lines still indicate the original groups. We will have to use the "Weld Group"
button on the bottom of the Group Palette to merge the current selection (red polygons) into one
complete group. Do that step last, after you have added all the polygons you want to add.
The trick here is to realize that you probably can't select all the polygons you would like to in one
selection. For best results, plan on taking your time and making smaller selections. This will cut down on
mistakes. When you do make a mistake, use the pop up menu on the Group Palette to select the group
that the polygons you just accidentally selected should belong to, then reselect them to add them back
into that group. Take your time with these steps and be patient.
I switch to a side view to look for more polygons to add to this group.

After a little work, I have a complete selection from this side.

When making these selections, check from all views possible to make sure you have found all the
polygons you want to add. Zoom in and out as necessary, and once again, take your time and be patient.
When you are satisfied you can click "Weld Group" to glue all these polygons together into one
selection. Repeat this process until satisfied, frequently checking the results of your changes in the Pose
room. You may find it necessary to move bones or even add or delete bones.

Moving On
After boning and grouping your model, you will need to adjust the joint rotation order, joint limits and
blend zones. The Poser Pro Pack User Guide and the Poser 4 Manual have a wealth of information on
these topics, so I wont go into detail here. You can save your new figure at any time by adding it to the
library. You should plan on creating your figure over the course of several work sessions, with the entire
process getting quicker and easier the more you do it. While creating a custom Poser figure is not overly
difficult it will take you a significant amount of time. More complex models will take much longer than
the simple ones, and I recommend you start with some fairly basic projects to get you comfortable with
the tools and the process. The tutorials in the Poser Pro Pack User Guide are a great place to start!
Once you have completed your own Poser figure you can do all the things you would normally do with a
Poser figure; animate it, add morph targets, create custom textures and more. You might even want to
share it with other Poser users in the Poser community! You can contact the author, Christopher Orth,
at corth@nwlink.com

03

Character Creation: Polygon Grouping

This document covers the grouping process including Scaling, The Grouping Tool.
If you have not already downloaded the support Runtime for this tutorial get it here.
Before rigging a character in Poser Pro, the polygons must be grouped and named appropriately in
order to correspond with the appropriate bones and Posers' internal engine. The process of grouping
polygons in Poser Pro is fairly straight forward and similar to many other tools available for
accomplishing the same task.
Requirements: Poser Pro is required.

Scaling and Import Options

Before beginning the grouping process, know that Poser's scaling is minutely smaller than that in your
modeling application so, if you bring your character in to Poser Pro without making a scaling
compensation, your figure will be much larger and may even be so large that it does not appear on the
screen. One way to adjust for this is to use a free application called Objaction Scaler to scale down your
figure for poser. Another way is to set Poser's import options to the following screen shot:

Once you have your character in the scene, you can then scale it according to your needs or what the
size of the character would be in relation to other objects in a scene.

The Grouping Tool

To use Poser's Grouping Tool in either the Pose Room or Setup Room, select it and hit the New Group
button. Give the group a name and then drag the mouse over the polygons you want to assign to the
group. You don't have to select all the polygons in one shot and you're not stuck with your selection
either. If you look above the box that holds the group name, you'll see a pair of buttons with a + and a sign. These will allow you to add additional polygons to a group or remove polygons from a group.
Another way to quickly add polygons to your groups is by selecting the "add material" button and then
adding the material groups to the body part group you are working on. For our character Nathan we will
create the head group using this method. First open the Grouping Tool and then click the New Group
button and name it "head". Next click the Add Material button and select the Head material then click
ok. You will see that all the polygons that are associated with the Head material are selected. Continue
this process for the head by adding the Teeth, Gums and Tongue material to the head group.
This process is best used for adding the "hard to get" polygons that are hidden inside the geometry.
There are other features to the grouping tool so be sure to check the Poser User's Manual for more on
this feature.

Also, when creating your groups for the body parts, it is best to create them so that they come as close
as possible to where the joint of the body part will be. See the image for the rShin group and you will
notice that the group starts at the center of the knee area.

While it isn't a "live by" rule to do this, it will help when setting up your joint parameters and keeping
the bends of the body parts smoother.
The important thing here is that the group names makes sense from a hierarchy standpoint and that
whatever naming convention you use for one side, you use for the other to help keep things
symmetrical.
A very basic and symmetrical setup is shown below:

As you can see, the eyes, arms and legs have each part named symmetrically.
The naming structure of your groups is important in that each group name should start with a lowercase
letter such as "head" and when naming the body parts like the shoulder you should begin the name
with a lowercase l or r l=left and r=right and then capitalize the first letter of the actual body part an
example would be rShldr= right shoulder. Abbreviating the body parts that have names longer than 8
characters is required when setting up your groups for Poser. The shoulder is a perfect example of this.
When naming your eyes for rigging keep the names lEye and rEye, this will make setting up the joint
parameters easier when doing the symmetry mirroring of the body parts. You can then later change the
names to lefteye and righteye after your jointing is done to prevent the eyes from swapping rotations if
you wish.
Some things, like eyes, may be easier to group outside of Poser due to their location within the mesh
and this can be done either in your modeling application or in a program like UV Mapper. When
grouping, feel free to switch views/preview types but you will likely want to only switch the preview
type between Wireframe, Hidden Line and Lit Wireframe, as these allow you to see the polygons you're
working with. Be careful in Wireframe preview mode, as any selection you make takes place on both the
front and back of the model.

Closing
Now, once we're done with the grouping we can switch to the Setup Room and begin the rigging
process.

04

Character Creation: Setup and Rigging

This document covers techniques used in character creation such as: Adding Bones, Editing Joint
Parameters, Labels and Limits, Setting Inverse Kinematics (IK), Setting the Default Pose, and Basic .CR2
editing
If you have not already downloaded the support Runtime for this tutorial, get it here.
This tutorial covers the basic steps and techniques used in Rigging a model and making it ready for use
in Poser.
Requirements: Poser Pro is required.

Adding Bones
Once you have your grouping done for your character, you are almost ready to enter the setup room to
create your bone structure for your character. Before we do, let's quickly recap one important area
from the grouping section, the head. In the grouping part of this tutorial, you were shown how to create
the head group and add other parts of the character mesh into it, the teeth, gums and tongue. This is
very important because when we create the head bone it will need to control all of these pieces when
posing. To see the a list of the groups after you have created them, open the grouping tool and click
inside the box where the first group name is listed, this will bring up a list of your groups. Looking at the
groups that were created in Nathan, we can see all the body parts as well as the original groupings for
the teeth, gums, and tongue.

These groups are no longer needed and need to be removed. To do this, select the group you wish to
remove and make sure it is shown in the group window, then click the "Delete Group" button. Do this
for each other left over groups.

Close the grouping tool. Now, we are ready to enter the SetUp Room. Simply click on the setup tab. You
will receive a dialog box that tells you that you are about to turn the figure prop into a figure and it will
ask you if you wish to continue. Select "Ok". Once in the Setup Room, you will see that it looks very
similar to the pose room except you can not pose the figure in here. You will also notice a new tool icon
on the tools the Bone tool.

This is the tool that we will use to create out bone structure. To see how you are drawing out the bones,
you can switch the document style to outline. This way you will be able to see inside the mesh to
position your bones better. The first bone we want to create is the hip bone. This is because the hip
actor of the character is the root parent which all of the other bones are joined to and spread out
from.(HipBone.png).

Simply position your mouse to the area that you want to start the bone and left click and draw out the
bone. You will notice that the hip bone is drawn so it is point towards the floor with the wider end of
the bone being base and the point being the tip, this is done to ensure that when rotating at the hip the
character rotates properly. You can think that your hip is being pulled by gravity and your leg swings out
from under you whether you are walking or doing a split so those bones would point down, but when
you bend over, your spine bends from an opposite direction so those bones would be drawn pointing
up.
There is also another important reason to try and draw you bones in the right direction, the rotation
order of the joints. Poser reads this information and lists it according to the direction of the bone. If you
draw the bone pointing down or up, then you have set the to YZX, if you draw the bone out to the side
you have set the rotation to XYZ, and, if you draw to the front or back, then you have set the rotation to
ZYX. But if during your boning process you accidentally draw the bone in the wrong direction, don't
worry, you can change the rotation order in the joint parameter window during the joint parameter
process. We will cover this in greater details in the Joint Parameter section of this tutorial. You can
name your bones as you create them to keep things a little more organized as you work. To do this, with
the bone selected, click on the "Properties" tab on the parameters palette you will see two windows at

the top one is the Internal name and the other is the Name. Change both names to match the name you
created when doing your grouping. In this case, we are calling this first bone "hip".

Remember to press enter after typing each name so that way the names are written and the bones are
automatically grouped into each body part group. Now, we will continue down the leg to build the bone
structure for the right leg. When building the bone structure, it is a good idea to change your views by
switching the different cameras so that you can get the angles of the bones to roughly follow the
structure of the character. After drawing out each new bone for your skeleton, you can move and
reposition each bone by simply switching to the Translate tool selecting the bone and moving it, doing
this will move any child bone that is attached to it as well.

Another way to adjust your bones, is to move your mouse pointer over either the base or tip of the
bone and make your adjustment. You will know when you have selected the base or the tip because
your mouse pointer will change from the cross hair cursor to an eye cursor. Click your left mouse button
and drag either the tip or base of your bone for your adjustment. This method will help you resize the

bone on the Y-axis if you have made it too long or too short. Once you have the right leg boned and
named, repeat the process for the left leg.

One thing to note, if you are building your bones and notice that one of the bones is not connected to
it's parent bone by a small line, don't worry, you can parent it to the parent bone. To do this, simply
select the bone you wish to parent, click on the properties tab on the palette and select "Set Parent". A
hierarchy window will open up. Scroll down until you find the bone you wish use as the parent, select it
and then select ok. Now you have your parent/child structure set. After completing both legs, you will
probably notice that the bones for each leg are not a mirror copy of the other. Don't worry about this,
any differences between the legs will be corrected once we start working on the joint parameters or you
can use Poser's symmetry feature found in the Figure menu at the top. This feature will allow you to
make one side of the body a mirrored copy of the other.

Continue working on the rest of the body. The hands are a good example of one parent bone having
multiple child bones as the thumb and each finger are connected to it. To do this, draw out your bone
that will be for the hand and then draw out the first bone or it's child. Once you have done that, go back
and select your hand bone and draw out it's next child and continue this process until you have all five
children bones of the hand drawn out.

Once you have this done, you can select each of the child bones for the fingers and thumb and continue
to draw out the rest of the bones for the rest of your finger joints. The Head area is another unique
place when setting up bones for your character. In the head of Nathan two dummy bones were created
in between each eye bone and the head bone.

This was done to create a buffer between the child/parent relationship of the eyes and head. The
purpose of these additional bones is to break that relationship so that way when you rotate the eyes in
posing they won't effect the head. When the parent/child relationship is created in Poser, this allows for
a blending of the two joints together for a smooth transition of one body part to the next. Insidethe
figure .cr2 child, information is written into the parent body part to allow this transition. For the eyes,
that is not something we want, if that relationship were left intact then what would happen when you
rotated the eyes is that the eye socket would distort. This is something we don't want so dummy bones
are created to separate the eyes from the head. Here's how our character Nathan looks with his bone
structure completed.

Before we leave the setup room to begin work on the joint parameters, there is still one more step to
take. In Nathan's head, we created the dummy bones between the head bone and each eye bone to
break the parent/child relationship, you can now simply delete them by selecting each dummy bone
and hitting the delete key. You will notice that each eye bone is still parented to the head but they are
independent in movement

Editing Joint Parameters

When setting up joint parameters for your character, there is on key element you must possess,
patience. This is not an overly difficult process but it does take time and you will find that you will have
to spend more time on certain body parts to get them to bend correctly. Also, during this process
remember to save your work often, preferably by saving your character to the character library and also
save backups. When you have successfully completed one part of the body, save it under a new name

so, if you have to backtrack, you can quickly do so by reloading an alternate version of the character.
There is nothing worse or more frustrating than having to redo work all over again.
Now that we have completed the bone structure for Nathan, it's time to move back into the pose room
and edit those joints for correct movement. To leave the setup room, simply click on the Pose tab and
enter the Pose room. At the top of the Pose window, you will see the name of the figure (in our case it is
Nathan) and next to that you will see the name of the current actor selected. To see a list of all your
body parts, click on the current actor name and a small menu will appear, then click Body Parts, and a
list of all your body parts will appear. You can also click on each body part of your figure in the pose
room and the current actor name will change to each of the body parts that is currently selected. One
note to make before we start working on the joint parameters (jp's), you can give your character a
unique name to help identify it in the select figure menu. To do this, open the Hierarchy editor listed in
the Window's menu at the top. Here you can see the hierarchy of your character (the parent/child
relationship of your joints ) as well as the names of your figure and body parts.

In the Hierarchy editor, you can re-name your figure as well as re-arrange the order of the body parts
listed. I've change the figure's name from Figure1 to Nathan.

When you have your figure renamed you can close the Hierarchy window. We will be using it again later
to set up our Inverse Kinematics (Ik) after we have set the joint parameters.

When working with joint parameters. it is best to set your document style to one of the the wire frame
modes: Wire, Hidden or Lit Wire and. if you have a hard time seeing the joint parameters. you can
change your display from OpenGL Hardware to SreeD Software in your display menu, Display >
PreviewDrawing. For this tutorial, I have set the document to Hidden and the display preview to Show.
Now, lets select the hip actor by clicking on the hip and open the joint editor. Go to the Windows menu
and select the Joint Editor. When the joint editor opens, the first thing we see is the center point
window and it's values. Let's take a look at each of these and understand what they mean.

At the top, you will see a box with the word Center, clicking on this will bring up a menu that will allow
you to select the different attributes for the joint. Below this box is the Show Deformers with a check
next to it, this will turn hide or show the Spherical Falloff Zones which will be discussed later. You can
leave this checked. Below are two rows of boxes for the hip joint. The first row is the location in 3d
space of the center point for the hip and the second row is the location of the end point for the hip.
These values are important because they represent the center of your rotation for the body part, in this
case the hip. The next thing to look at is the Orientation, this is where you can set the angle of your
center point so that it follows the angle of the body part. The final area to look at is the Rotation order.
If you click on the rotation order, you will get a menu that will allow you to select from six different
combination of rotations. Here is a list of the body part rotation orders and the rotation labels for each
of the body parts that we will be working with through out this tutorial. The labeling of the rotations will
come later in this section of the tutorial. You will notice that the list contains more body parts that what

we have created for Nathan. These addition body parts could be used for creating a more advanced
figure.

For the hip, we will leave the order at YZX. When the joint editor is open, you will see two cross hairs
appear on the hip, the green one is the center point and the red one is the end point.

Not all body parts will have both cross hairs, only the ones that don't have child bones attached to them
or have multiple children attached: the hip, the hands and the head. Moving your cursor over the center
of the cross hair you will see that the cursor changes from a cross hair to an eye. This means that you
can now move your center point around to orientate it better to the body part. The green cross hair
represents the center of your rotations so it is best to keep it as close to the joint intersection where the
joint's movements will begin. Once it is set at the joint intersection, orientate the cross hair so that it
centrally located in the central mass of the body part. One other point to make about the location of the
center point, for the hip, waist, abdomen, chest, neck and head setting the center point on the x axis to
zero is essential to keeping the figure balanced. Since the hip is the root actor of our character, we only
need to worry about the set up of the center point. Now, let's move on and begin setting up the jp's for
the rest of the body. For the purpose of this tutorial, we will start at the toes and work our way up the
leg. We won't be covering all the body parts but the method shown here can be used through out the
characters body.
With the joint editor open, select the right toe. The first thing we want to do is make sure the rotation
order is correct for the toe. You can refer to the rotation order list that I have provided to make sure
that your body parts have the correct rotation. If you find a body part that doesn't have the correct

rotation order, simply click on the rotation order and select the correct one from the list. One thing to
note, if you change the order of your rotation on a body part such as the feet, legs, arms or eyes you
need to need to change the rotations on the opposite body part as well so that they match up. After you
have ensured that your rotation is correct, move your center point to the intersection of the foot and
toe and align it into the center mass of the mesh, following the center line of the toe so that the center
point follows the angle of the toe. Remember to use the orientation dials to rotate the center and end
points, the orientation dials will rotate both at once. Then, move the end point so that it is aligned to
the center point but just outside the tip of the toe actor.

Feel free to switch your camera settings to get this properly aligned. I find working in the main, left and
top cameras best for this. One thing you can do when working in the top camera is to turn off body
parts that you aren't working on. You can hide the body parts by opening the Hierarchy editor and

clicking on the eye icon next to each of the body parts you wish to hide. After you have the center and
end points lined up, go to the joint editor and click on the top box where the Center is labeled.

This will open a menu that will allow you to select the each of the rotation attributes which we will work
on.
Select the z rotation. When have done this, you will notice a long line with a handle at opposite ends,
one red and the other green in the pose room on the body part.

In the joint editor, you will see controls for this. At the top, you will see under the Show Deformer box, a
box labeled Spherical Falloff Zones. If you check this box, Poser will create two spheres: a red one and a

green one. For the toe actors, we won't be using them with any of the attributes, but later, for the foot
body part, we will be so they will be discussed then. Next, we have the StartTwist and EndTwist.

In these, you will see the numerical value for your rotation. These values will change as you change the
attribute. This particular attribute is unique, later on when we label these attributes you will see that
the first one will always be the twist attribute regardless of what angle it is. What makes this first
attribute unique is that it isn't dependant on the center point, you can adjust either the size and
placement of the attribute by moving each handle, this will allow you to adjust just how much or how
little of the body part is effected by it. The red handle represents the start of the twist and the green is
the end of it. For this rotation to look smooth, you need a smooth transition in the mesh from the end
of the twist to the start so to check that turn the zRotate dial in the parameter palette to a relatively
high value in both the positive and negative directions and watch the mesh, you may need to change
your document style to SmoothLined in order to see this better. Once you are happy with the transition,
reset the dial on the parameter palette to 0.
Let's select the next rotation attribute in the joint editor, for the toe it will be the yRotate attribute.
Later, we will name this attribute Side-Side, but, in some of the other body parts, it will have a different
label. We see in the joint editor a new set of controls:

Below the Spherical Falloff Zones are the Exclusion: Static A, Static D and Inclusion: Dynamic B and
Dynamic C values. And lastly the Bulge settings. Presently, the Apply Bulge is uncheck and there are no
values on the dials. After we have set the rotation, we may apply this control. In the pose room, the
Inclusion and Exclusion values are represented by four angled lines, two red (the exclusion values) and
two green (the inclusion values). Adjusting each of these will change the numeric values labeled in the
joint editor. The polygons that are in between the two green lines are the ones that will be directly
affected by the rotation and the polygons between the two red lines will not be effected by the
rotation. The area between each of the green-red lines is your blending area and those polygons will
give you a smooth transition from the inclusion zone and the exclusion zone.

To adjust the areas, let's go again to the parameter palette and apply a positive value to the y rotation
dial, a value of 25 is good. Next, lets first adjust the inclusion polygons by moving the cursor over the
ends of each green angle line. When the cursor turns from a crosshair to an eye, you can move the angle
of the line either further out or in to change the amount of polygons that are directly effected by the
rotations. Adjust each green line until you are happy with the results. Now, do the same thing for each
of the red angle lines. Remember that when you make your adjustments to either include or exclude
polygons you will either increase or decrease the blending area. When you are happy with your
adjustments, return to the parameter palette and apply a negative value to the y rotation dial and check
your results. You may have to make some more adjustments to your angle lines if you are not happy
with the new results. Remember, when you are adjusting body parts, to test them in both directions for
the attributes. What looks good in one direction, may not look good in the other so it is a balancing act
to find a set of angle values that works for both directions. You will probably have to go back and forth
until you have achieved a good balance in both directions. Now that we have the angles set on Nathan's
toes, we can see that there are some small issues with bulging and creasing so we will use the apply
bulge control in the joint editor.

To apply the bulge setting in the joint editor, put a check next to the Apply Bulges. Now you can use the
dials below to adjust the mesh to smooth out the crease and bulge in Nathan's toe. The four dials are
labeled right neg, left neg, right pos and left pos. The right and left negative dials will adjust the mesh
when the rotation dial on the parameter palette has a negative value on it and, conversely, the right and
left positive dials will adjust the mesh when the rotation dial has a positive value on it. What value to
use on these dials is up to the discretion of the character creator but I should point out that the density
of the mesh should be taken into account as well. A lower density mesh would allow for higher values
on the bulge dials while a higher density mesh would only require a small value for adjustment. If you
use too high of values, you will either balloon or collapse the mesh. Putting a negative value in the bulge
dials, will cause the mesh to compress inwards and a positive value will expand the mesh outwards. For
Nathan's toe, you can see that the values used where not that high.

For the next rotation attribute, the x rotation you will see that the controls in the joint editor look
identical to those from the previous rotation attribute so the only thing that needs to be said here is to
repeat the process for the last joint attribute until you are satisfied with the rotation of the body part.
Now that you have the joint parameters set up for the right toe, the next thing you want to do is copy
them over to the left toe. Before you can do this, select the left toe and make sure it has the same
rotation order as the right one. When you have done this, go to the Figure menu and select Symmetry
then select Right to Left, Figure > Symmetry > Right to Left. You will see a message dialog asking if you
want to copy the joint zone's setup also. Select yes. You have now mirrored the right toe over to the
left. You can verify this by selecting the left toe and looking at all the rotation attributes. Let's move on
to the foot now.
The method for setting up the joint parameters in the toes is the same method used in setting all the
joint parameters throughout the body so I won't be repeating any of the steps here. Instead, what I will
be covering is the use of the Spherical Falloff Zones and pointing out that the rotation order for the foot
is different from that of the toes, but the same as those in the shins and thighs. Again, refer to the
rotation order list to verify that you have the right rotation orders for the different parts of the body.
You will also notice that there no end point in the foot, that is because the foot is not an end joint and
has only one child bone attached to it.
The first rotation attribute that will use the spherical falloff zones is the z rotation. After you have set
your center point properly and are satisfied with your y rotation attribute, select the z rotation attribute
to open it's joint editor controls. Now, put a check next to the Spherical Falloff Zones.

You instantly see that Poser has created two sphere in the center of the pose room, a green one and a
red one. The green sphere acts identically to the green angles of the rotation attributes in that
everything within the green sphere is effected directly by the rotation-inclusion, and everything outside
the red sphere is left un-effected by the rotation- exclusion. The area inside the red sphere but outside
the green sphere is your blending area.

You will also see that the spheres come in at a very large size. Don't worry, you can adjust the size of
them to fit the needs of the body part. First, move each sphere so that it is located centrally
encompassing the body part i.e. the right foot. To do this, select each sphere and either drag it across
the screen with your mouse or use the x, y, or z trans dials on the parameter palette to move them into
position. Now that you have them positioned where you want them, adjust the size of each using the
four scaling dials on the parameter palette. You can change the preview of the spheres by selecting each
and then changing the "element" style by going to the display menu and selecting Element Style and
selecting a solid preview to ensure that the sphere are completely covering the body part. You can then
change the preview back to outline afterwards. You will also find that, after scaling, you will have to
reposition each sphere again to encompass the foot. Because the toe is the child of the foot you want to
make sure the green inclusion sphere encompasses that as well, if you don't, then when you rotate the
foot your toe will not move along with the foot properly.

I should point out that, while you should encompass the toe actor within the green inclusion sphere,
that is not going to be the case for every body part that you use the spherical falloff zone. It is not
necessary to have the red outer sphere completely encompass the green one. The purpose of the red
sphere is to act as a barrier to the joint parameter while at the same time creating a blending zone for
the green inner sphere. Once you have the spherical falloff zones sized and positioned around the foot,
you can adjust the rotation attributes as before until you are happy with how the foot poses in the z
rotation. Now, repeat the process for the x rotation attribute of the foot.
While working on your character, you will find that you may not get the sphericals set up properly on
the first or second try, two major areas where this will be the case are the thighs and collars of the
character. In the thigh, you have a very tight area in the crease where the thigh joins the hip as well as
the buttock area and in the collar you have a large amount of mesh but not all of it needs to be affected
by the rotation. These areas also have the greatest range of motion so be patient and don't be afraid to
experiment with the sphericals in size and placement. Sometimes what you think may not work will be
what succeeds and also remember to test your joints in both directions as you are working with the
joint attributes and spherical falloff zones.
There is a fourth attribute in the joint editor that you will need to be concerned with because this helps
you scale body parts to change the proportions if you desire. This attribute looks similar to the attribute
that controls the twist rotation except the long center line is red.

Moving the green or red handles will adjust where and how much of the mesh the scaling effects. This
attribute is always one that you, the character creator, should experiment with to get the desired effect.
In some body parts, you won't have to worry about setting all three of the rotation attributes because
the human body skeletal system restricts the movement in those areas. The shins and forearms are
good examples of areas that only need to have two of the three rotations set. The eyes are another
exception but those will be talked about later. For the shin, you only need to worry about the Y and X
rotation, the forearm only needs the X and Y rotations. While you can still rotate the body parts on the
unneeded rotation axis, the figure would look un-natural unless this is what you intend for your
character.
When working on your joints, you may notice that they flatten out, I call this the "Table Effect". What
causes this is when one of your inclusion or exclusion angles is too close to the mesh and that causes
the flattening out.

You can correct this by moving the angles away from the mesh and by applying bulges in the joint editor
for the rotation attribute.

It is up to you, the character creator, to decide what works best for your character. In the beginning of
this tutorial, it was mentioned that in joints that have alot of movement you should build up the density
of the mesh to prevent the mesh from becoming blocky. As you can see in Nathan's knee, this was done
and the knee has a very smooth bend to it.

Another situation you may encounter when working with joint parameters is "pinching", when the mesh
compresses in on itself.

If you think about your skin and how it reacts when you bend your joints, it does compress on itself and
pinches so this may be acceptable to you. Again, it is subjective. You can keep adjusting your
inclusion/exclusion angles and sphericals to lessen this if you don't want this effect.
When setting up the joint parameters for the eyes, there are two things that you really need to do here.
The first is to get the center points aligned to the center mass of the eye. The eyes and hip are the only
two body parts that should have the center point located dead center. The next thing to do is to turn off
the bend for the eyes. To do this, select each eye and open the properties on the parameter palette and
uncheck the Bend box.

You have now turned the eyes into free floating body parts and don't need to adjust the rotation
attributes. Just make sure your center point is positioned in the center of the eye. As mentioned earlier,
the eyes will only be using two of the three rotation angles, X and Y. At the end of this joint parameter

section, I will show you how to hide the Z rotation inside the character file so that it won't show up on
the parameter palette.
Another important area to talk about is the thumb joints. The first thumb joint uses the twist attribute
in a unique way by moving the thumb into a cupping position. The attribute runs parallel to the joint
instead of down the center of it. Setting up the rotation axis and it's handles is very important so that all
the mesh outside the green handle will have the full twist effect. The mesh outside the red handle will
not be effected with the axis line being the blending area. This, along with the placements of the
spherical falloff zones, is what allows the first thumb joint to rotate into that cup.

Labels and Limits

Now that you have the joints completed for your character, it's time to label the rotation dials and set
the limits for each joint of your character. The labeling of the dials is just an easy way for the user to
identify which directions that dial controls. See the rotation and label list that I provided in the joint
parameter setup section to see how you should label each dial for each body part. When using limits
inside of Poser, the program restricts the rotations of the body parts to they don't ever go beyond the
values that you give. The helps prevent your character from seeming unnatural in it's movements. When
deciding what values you should use for your limitations, think about your own body. Each of us have
different ranges of flexibility. Athletes are far more flexible than the average person and there are also
people that have the ability to wrap themselves up like a pretzel. For example, you can set the z rotation
of the hand to a range of -75 to 70. This is a pretty typical range of motion for hand movement.

Remember, when dealing with body parts that have opposites, the values that you give on the rotations
will be mirror opposites for the other side. Again, in the hand the z rotation for the right hand could be 75 to 70 but for the left hand that range would be -70 to 75. As you go through these ranges, you can
verify what values should be given mirror opposites by moving the rotation dials. On any body part that
has a restricted movement such as the shin, with the z rotation, use the values of 0 and 0 and, when
using limitations, Poser will effectively lock those dials so, even though you can move the dials, the body
parts won't move. Now that you understand what the labeling and limits do, let's go ahead and actually
set some up. First, select the rToe actor on your character, then double click on the zRotate dial in the
parameters palette. This will open your parameter settings dialog box.

In this dialog, you will see the first box labeled Value and this should have a value of zero. We will leave
this alone. The next box below is your Minimum Limit, this will always be a negative value, so let's set it
to -10. Next is the Maximum Limit. This will always be a positive value, change the value to 20. Then in
the Name box you see zRotate from the rotation list above you see that for the rToe the z rotation has
the label of Twist so change the name to Twist. The last box is labeled Sensitivity. This box tells Poser
how fast or how slow to move the dial when the user rotates it. Leave this value at one. When you have
made your changes, they should look like the changes I have made.

Select ok to close the dialog box. Looking at the parameter palette, you will now see that the zRotate for
the rToe is now labeled Twist. Repeat this process for each body part. When you get to the eyes, do not
label the zRotate dial. Later, I will show you have to do basic .cr2 editing to hide that unused dial. One
thing to note is that the symmetry feature in Poser will not allow you to mirror your limit values over
from one side of the body to the other. You will have to manually do each body part which is why I
mentioned that each opposing sides will have mirror opposite values. The one body part that won't
have any labels or limits is the Hip actor. This is because the hip is the root parent for the entire body
and using it's rotations will rotate the entire body. Save your work when you have finished.
Setting Inverse Kinematics (IK)
Poser's Inverse Kinematics aids you in creating natural poses and animations and are very easy to set
up. An IK is a chain of body parts with a goal or end part of the chain. In the legs, the goal would be the
feet and in the arms the goal would be the hands. When using IK's, you can select the feet or hands and
move them and the rest of the body parts in the chain will move along with them. I've created a list of
body parts associated with each IK chain in the figures body.

To set up each IK, open the Hierarchy Editor. Scroll to the bottom of the window until you see IK Chains.
Select it, you will then see the "Create IK Chain" button become active.

Click the Create IK Chain button. A dialog box will open prompting you to give your IK chain a name.
Label it LeftLeg. Repeat this three more times for the RightLeg, LeftHand and Right Hand IK chains,
remember to select the IK Chain label in the hierarchy each time before clicking the create IK chain
button.

Now we have blank IK Chains, we need to tell them what body parts are in them. To do this, first click on
the arrow next to Nathan's waist, this will collapse the hierarchy for all the body parts parented to the
waist actor, this will make things easy to work on when creating the IK chains for the legs. Next, select
the Left Thigh from the hierarchy list and while holding the left mouse button drag it down to and over
the LeftLeg label in your IK Chain list then release the mouse button. You will get a message telling you
that this action can not be undone. Do you wish to continue? Select ok. Now you will see that the left
thigh is listed under the leftleg ik chain with the word goal in parentheses. Don't worry about that, the
thigh isn't the goal, the foot is but Poser will always label the last body part in the chain as the goal and
since right now you only have the thigh poser has labeled that as the goal.

Select the Left Shin and repeat the same process and again for the Left Foot. When you are done, you
should have the left thigh listed first, then the left shin and lastly the left foot as the goal.

If you make a mistake in this process, you will have to delete the character out of the scene and reload
him and try again. This is why it is always good to save your work in increments. If you do make a
mistake, you won't have to redo a lot of work. So save often and save after each IK chain is created!
Repeat this process for each of the remaining three IK chains until you have each build.

Once you have your IK Chains created you can close the Hierarchy Editor.

Setting The Default Pose and Memorizing the Character.

Now that you have your IK Chains created, you need to set a default pose for your character. The
default pose will consist of posing your characters legs in such a way so that when you have your IK's
turn on and move the figure's hips the legs will move in a natural fashion and not buckle or bend in odd
ways. The best way to do this is to go to the Figure menu select "Use Inverse Kinematics" and put a
check next to the left and right legs.

Now, with the Translate/Pull Tool selected select your character's hip actor and pull it towards the
ground and watch how your character's legs bend. Most likely, they will bend backwards in an unnatural
fashion.

This tells us that the legs have to be posed slightly bent forwards and, because the knees buckled
towards the center, you may have to twist the legs outwards as well and probably pose them to the
sides. You will find that you will need to pose the thighs, shins, and feet to properly obtain your default
pose. To make your adjustments, go to Figure > Use Inverse Kinematics and uncheck both legs, this will
allow you to pose your body parts separately. When you have one leg posed, you can use the symmetry
feature to mirror it over to the other leg. Test your pose by turning on the IK for the legs and pull down
on the hip. You may have to do this a few times until you get the legs bending naturally with the IKs on.
After you have found your default pose, make sure you have the IKs turned on. Now it is time to
memorize your figure. This is so, that if after posing your figure, you decide you do not like the pose,
you can very quickly restore him back to the default position. To do this, simply go to the Edit menu
select Memorize then select Figure. Now save your work again.

Basic .CR2 Editing

Now that we have our figure completed, we still need to hide the zRotate dial in each of the eyes. We
are going to do this because that rotation dial is not needed. There are a few .cr2 editing programs
available for free download but, for this tutorial, we will be using a simple text editor. I like to use
NotePad2, it is also a free download. Launch your text editor program and open your character's .cr2 file
by going to open and directing it to where that file is located. Make sure you have the file type set to

"All Files". Next go to Edit > Find and type in lefteye and hit the find button twice, this will bring you to
the actual left eye actor and all it's information.

Now, in the find dialog, type in zrot and hit the Find button twice. This will take you to the information
for the zRotate dial.

Five lines below the words rotatez zrot, you will see the word hidden with a zero next to it. Change that
zero to a one. What this does is tell Poser that this dial is hidden and not to be shown on the parameter
palette. Repeat the process for the right eye. After you have hidden the zrotate dial in both eyes, save
your .cr2 under a new name just for testing. Go to File > Save As > "Newfilename".cr2, make sure you
save the file with the extension of .cr2. This will ensure that poser reads the file correctly and you can
load the figure into the scene. Make sure you have "All files" set in the File type box, then select Save.
Now, load your new figure into the scene and select each eye. You will see that now the z rotation dial is
hidden from the parameter palette.

Closing
Once you have correctly setup and rigged the character you should proceed to creating morph targets.

05

Character Creation: Textures and materials

This document covers the material preparation and texturing of a character including: Material Zones
and Grouping, Adding Nodes and Image Maps, Normal Maps, and Materials Collections.
If you have not already downloaded the support Runtime for this tutorial, get it here.
There are many different programs that you can use to create your character's texture maps. Such as
Photoshop, Zbrush, DeepPaint and BodyPaint. For the purpose of this tutorial, Nathan's texture and
Normal maps were created in Zbrush then saved out as PNG files. Poser recognized a multitude of
image files like .png, .jpg, .bmp and .psd to name a few. However, if you are planning on distributing
your Poser files or have limited resources in your computer like memory, cpu speed or hard drive space,
it is recommended to use one of the compressed image types like .png or .jpg.
Requirements: Poser Pro is required

Material Zones
The first step will be to set up your material zones. This can be done within your modeling application as
you create your model, within your UV mapping application as you create your UVs, or it can be done
from within Poser via the Grouping tool. If you decide to do it within Poser, you would do well to group
your model first and then make materials for them. Lets give it a try.
With the object or figure selected, turn on the Grouping Tool. Youll see a name for one of the groups at
the top of the tools window. Click this name and youll find a listing of all the available groups in the
figure. For the purpose of this example, lets click on the Hip. The button labeled Assign Material, will
allow you to create a material for a group. Click the Assign Material button.

A dialog box will appear where you can give the new material a name. Its best to use names that fit the
item the material will be applied too. For the hip, since its part of the body and the body, with the
exception of the head, all share UV space, should have a material assigned to it called Body. Nathan
already has materials assigned to him, so for now, well assign the hip to a material called Skin, just for
the sake of the tutorial.

Well now want to add other body parts to this material. Select the lThigh group and click the Assign
Material button again but this time, instead of entering a name for the material, click the button
labeled Materials and choose Skin from the list.

Click OK and the Skin material will now be assigned to both the hip and the lThigh groups. You would
then normally continue on this way, creating and assigning materials as needed, making sure to SAVE
OFTEN. However, we dont want to save this, as its just an example, so lets just stop at the hip and
lThigh and move on to material attributes, shall we?

Adding Nodes and Image Maps

Click the Material Tab to move to the Material Room. Here, you will be able to alter the parameters of
the materials to achieve certain looks for them as well as giving them various attributes. Initially, youll
be faced with the Simple material editor.

This is where you can make basic changes to the material. At the top of the material editor, you will see
two drop down menus. The first is labeled Object and this is where you can choose what Poser file to
which you want to apply your materials. The second is labeled Material and this menu allows you to
choose which material group you will be editing. There are options for the Diffuse Color, Highlight,
Ambient, Reflection, Bump and Transparency. To load a texture into any of these fields, click on the
large empty squares below the name of the channel you are affecting. For example, if I wanted to add a
color map to the diffuse channel, I would make the Diffuse Color white and then right below the color,
Id click the inside the box. The reason you want the diffuse color set to white is because whatever color
you choose there will be blended into the color map, thus affecting the final render. White will have
little to no affect. Once you click on the box as described above, youll be presented with a dialog box
where you can choose your 2D image and load it as a texture. Normally, the texture loaded into the
Diffuse Color, is called a Diffuse Map. This map contains all the color information you want to apply to
your model.

Lets say however, you want more control over the way a material renders. To get that control, youll
need to hit the Advanced tab, doing so will present you with a new window to work in. This window
provides a node based system with which you can affect the chosen material. As with the Simple Tab,
selecting which object and which material you are working on is easy. To select the object you want to
work with, go to the word Object at the top of the window and choose the object you want. To select
the material you want to work with, go to the word Material at the top of the window and choose the
material you want to adjust from the list. Usually, Poser will have the currently selected figure as your
active object and its very first texture selected as the material youre working with.

The first thing you may see when working with advanced material settings is that the Advanced window
has a smaller window in it labeled "Poser Surface". This window contains the various channels that can
be adjusted to affect the material. For now well concern ourselves with the first channel, Diffuse Color.
As with the Simple material window, the Diffuse Color channel allows you to assign a 2d texture map to
it. This is done by creating and attaching a node to the channel. Nodes are modifiers that, when
attached to channels, result in a wide range of effects. You can assign as few or as many nodes as you
like or use none at all, it depends on your needs for the image and/or model. Even the Background,
Lights and Props can have materials and nodes assigned to them.
To create a node for the image, we want to attach to the Diffuse Color. Right click in an empty location
next to the channel listings and choose New Node > 2D Textures > Image_map. (DefuseNode.png) In
this case, this will create an empty node called Image Map to which you assign an image. Click where
it says None next to Image Source on the node. A window will pop up where you can locate the image
you want to apply. You can select from the already loaded 2d maps (if you loaded one already) or from
your hard drive by clicking Browse. Click Browse and youll usually be taken to your Runtimes texture

directory. Do so now and locate Nathans folder. Within that folder, locate a texture called Nathan
Body Color and click it.

You will then be returned to the dialog box where you can Browse for images. Only one image can be
assigned to a single node, so we wont want to browse again. Instead, take a look at the two
options/settings below the Browse button. This is the Gamma Correction settings. You can choose to
allow Poser to decide the gamma correction for you or you can set it manually. In most cases, youll
want to allow Poser to decide the gamma correction for you but when dealing with Displacement Maps,
Normal Maps, and Bump Maps, its best to set the gamma correction manually to 1. Using any other
number with these types of maps can result in undesirable artifacts. Since this is a Diffuse map, well
leave things at the default and hit Ok. That image will now be assigned to that node.

Doing this wont be enough to have the image appear when rendered, however. Well now need to plug
that node into one of the channels, in this case, the Diffuse channel. To do so, well click and drag on the
plug icon at the upper left corner of the Image Map node and pull it over to the socket icon of the
Diffuse Color channel. The Diffuse color should be set to white, if it isnt already, if it is, youll see that
the texture now applies itself to the figure correctly.

Congratulations, youve applied your first texture! However, this was just a color map and lacks depth.
To get depth in the material, well need to add a bump map, normal map or displacement map (or a
combination of those).

Normal Maps
For the sake of this tutorial, well apply a Normal Map. Without getting too technical, a Normal Map is a
map that works like a bump map but actually affects an objects normals in such a way that the added
detail reacts to lighting in the scene. Since the map is an external 2d image, well import it just like we
did the Diffuse Map but with one exception, the Gamma Correction for that image must be set to 1. So,
browse within Nathans texture folder until you see Nathan Body Normal. Select this image and set
the Gamma Correction manually by clicking the Custom Gamma Value option and changing the
number there to 1.

Hit OK and drag the plug in the upper left of this image node to the channel labeled, Gradient Bump.
Youll usually want to leave the setting for that channel at 1, which means full strength. Below that,
theres another option youll need to adjust so that Poser treats the map we just plugged in correctly.
This option is labeled, Gradient Mode and it is here that you can choose between, Gradient Map,
Normal Map (tangent space), and Normal Map (object space).
As you can see, there are two flavors of Normal Maps, object based (which is better for inanimate
objects) and tangent based (which are better for objects that have moving parts). You can tell the
difference between the two types of maps by how much blue is in them, tangent based maps will be
predominantly blue, while object based maps will be more rainbow in color (leaning often to green).
There are various programs available where you can generate a normal map, Zbrush, Mudbox, Silo, etc.
For now, well just concern ourselves with what to do with the map we just plugged into the Gradient
Bump Channel. In the Gradient Mode option, click the little triangle and choose Normal Map (tangent
space).

Now that youve done that, you can apply diffuse maps to the other parts of the body. In Nathans case,
only the body and head have a normal map but depending on the situation, any or all parts of the body
could use a normal, or bump, or displacement map its all up to you to decide what works best.
In some instances, you may need additional maps like a Specular map (which adjusts how highlights
form across a surface), Translucency maps (which determine how much light passes through a surface),
Transparency maps (which determines how opaque a surface is), Reflection maps (which determines
what gets reflected on a surface), Refraction maps (which determines how much and in what way light
gets distorted when passing through a surface). Again, all of this depends on the needs of the object or
the scene. Usually, youll want to use various channels in conjunction with each other like we did for
Nathan.

Material collections
Once you have all your materials set up with texture maps or colors, you can save a single material
setting or a complete material collection that can be used over again. What this does is create a file that
is written in Poser that will quickly assign all or individual materials to a poser figure or other poser files.

To create this file, open your library palette and select Materials from the top menu. Now you can
create a folder to store your material collection by clicking on the "Add new category" from the top
menu. For the tutorial, a folder called Nathan was created. Open this folder by double clicking on it. To
add a material collection to the folder, click on the plus sign at the bottom of the library palette. You will
get a dialog box. At the top of the dialog box, type in the name of your material or material collection.

For this tutorial, we will be creating a full material collection for Nathan so, after you have given your
name, select Material Collection and click Select Materials. This will open a new window in which you
can select which material groups you wish to add to the material collection. For this tutorial, we will
leave all the material groups selected.

Click Ok to close out both dialog boxes. Now you have saved a Material Collection to you library that can
be used over again. If you only wanted to save a single material group instead of an entire collection,
you can select the material group you wish to save by clicking the Material menu at the top and scrolling
to the material group you want to save then repeating the same steps above except after giving your
material a name select Single Material instead of Material Collection then click ok. This will save just the
selected material group to your library.
Once you are done setting up all your materials, you can exit out of the material room by clicking on the
Pose tab at the top. This will bring you back to the Pose Room where you can now save your character
to the figure library with the textures already applied so the next time you load your figure into the
scene it will contain all the material settings.

06

Getting Acquainted in the Face Room

This document covers the use of the Face Room including Photo Lineup and Face Scuplting.
Requirements: Poser 5 or greater is required.
The Photo Lineup feature in the Face Room can be challenging at first, but it's a powerful tool to
customize your Poser figures.
The Photo Lineup tools give you a good deal of control over the placement and orientation of the photo;
they also allow a good degree of control over the shape of the face, through the built-in morphs. The
trick to using the Face Room is to understand the proper workflow. Using the tools in the right order can
avoid potential problems with faces getting distorted- distortions can happen if the tools are used in the
wrong order.
When you enter the Face Room, you should see your figure's face in a 3/4 view, as shown below. You
can use the camera controls to pan around, zoom in and out, and see the face from different angles.

Now, to begin using the Photo Lineup, let's bring in a face. The images that you use don't have to be
terribly large- 500-1000 pixels in each dimension is usually fine- but they should be clearly lit and
uncluttered. Ideally, the face should be clearly presented against a plain, neutral-colored background;
the two photos should be taken from straight ahead and as close to 90 as possible. Artistically posed,
dramatically lit head-shots tend not to work very well at all.
To bring in a face, click the folder icon at the left side of the Photo Lineup workspace, and in the Open
dialog that pops up, find the picture that you'll be using.

Poser will ask you to click on your photo to identify the outer corner of the eye, and the side of the
mouth. This lets Poser do a rough match of facial features in the photo to those on the head of the 3D
figure. We'll be fine-tuning these proportions shortly.
When the photo first comes into the Face Room, it won't line up perfectly with the head outline- this is
normal (see fig. 2) As a first step to fitting the photo to the head, we will need to resize the photo and
adjust its position.
Note: if you skip resizing and positioning and jump straight into pulling the adjustment dots around, you
risk distorting your image map and/or the 3D head. While this is fixable, it may give unpredictable
results. We strongly recommend resizing and positioning your photo before proceeding to adjusting the
dots.
Click and drag on the resizing tool (see fig. 4 below) to change the apparent size of the head outline,
such that it fits the photo; click and drag on the positioning tool to move the photo around. You may
need to go back and forth, alternately resizing and repositioning, until the face outline properly lines up
with the face in the photo.

You can also adjust facial morphs here, to adjust the 3D head to approximate the shape of the face in
the photo. If you're not certain how these dials work, or how to use them, don't worry- we'll be using
another tool as well to adjust the shape of the face. With the photo sized and positioned to best
advantage, it's time to work with the adjustment dots. As you adjust the dots to bring the features into
their final configuration, you may find it useful to zoom in on part of the face to fine-tune the
adjustment. Use the magnifying glass tool to do this, as shown in fig. 4 below. You can also rotate the
3D preview head to check your work as you go.

The dots act to change the shape of the face by altering several facial morph targets all at once- if you
reveal the facial morph dials, you can see the values change as the dots are moved around. It is possible
to use the dots to drive the morph values past their maximum- this can cause strange distortions of the
face and is the reason why we recommend sizing and positioning the photo before using the dots.

With the face adjusted, you can now click the "Apply to Figure" button- but there are a couple of other
options you might want to use.
"Apply Shape Only" just changes the shape of the face; it's more subtle than applying both the shape
and the texture from the photo, but if you're working from a black-and-white photo, for example, or if
the lighting in the photo is very different from the lighting in your Poser scene, it can be useful to apply
only the shape, and adjust the skin-tone of the head (and body) in the Material Room. Additionally, the
Face Room applies texture changes only to the head; matching the skin-tone of the body with that of
the head can be difficult.
"Spawn Morph Target" doesn't appear to do anything- but in fact it applies the shape changes that have
been created, not as locked-in values, but as an adjustable morph, set by default to zero. This allows you
to "dial in" morph values for the altered face shape at different points in your Poser animation, to let
you change the face over time. For example, you might apply an age morph as part of the adjustment,
to make your figure appear to age during the animation- or you might want to have one face morph into
another. You can even take the same figure back into the Face Room several times to generate
additional facial morphs that can be "layered" on each other for all kinds of interesting effects.
After clicking either Apply to Figure, Apply Shape Only, or Spawn Morph Target, you can return to the
Pose Room by clicking the Pose tab. And you're done!

07

Setup Room Tutorial: How to make Goldy the Robot

This document covers the use of the Setup Room and how to assemble Poser props into figures. Goldy
the Robot was created by assembling Poser props from the Props library. For this example, she will use
a skeleton belonging to an existing library figure and adjusted as necessary.
Requirements: Poser 5 or greater, Poser Artist, and Poser Pro Pack are required.

Begin by launching Poser and importing the file goldy.obj from your Poser Pro Pack CD's
Documentation\Samples folder.
Set both Full Tracking and the Texture Shaded document display style, and enter the Setup
Room. Set the Front camera. Goldy should now appear as follows.
Open the Figure library and select Figures > Poser 2 Lo > Default Guy. Click the Change Figure
button to load the skeleton. Note that you can also begin at the hip and create a skeleton from
scratch, just as you did with Wormy.
Select the Translate tool and position the bones on your left (Goldy's right) side and center
(Outline view shown for maximum contrast).
Select Figure > Symmetry > Right to Left. Click Yes when prompted to copy joint zone setups.
Goldy's skeleton should now look something like this.
Goldy's bones are now aligned side to side. Select a side view (or multiple pane view) and adjust
the front-to-back alignment. As in the previous step, you can use symmetry to save time. When
you are finished, select the Main camera and fly around Goldy to make sure that the skeleton is
correctly placed.
At this point, you could use the Auto Group tool. However, Goldy's hoop will not work properly,
since the Grouping Tool will assign its polygons to the hips and abdomen, causing the hoop to
distort or break as Goldy moves. To prevent this, select a side view, select the abdomen bone,
and draw a new bone protruding from Goldy's center to the hoop.
The Auto Group tool will assign some of the hoop polygons to the bone you created, and others
to the hip, thighs, etc. Simply select the group corresponding to the bone you created in the
previous step, and add the rest of the hoop polygons to the group to make the hoop move
properly.
Check all of the groups to ensure that the correct polygons are assigned to each group. Make
any necessary adjustments. When you are finished, exit the Setup Room and try posing Goldy.
Not too bad for a few minutes' work. Still, to make Goldy move like a robot instead of an organic
figure, you will need to adjust the joint parameters. You may also need to adjust the bones
and/or turn off body part bending by selecting body parts and disabling bending in the
Properties dialog as well. The Poser scene Goldy_Raw.pz3 in your Poser Pro Pack CD's
Documentation\Samples folder shows Goldy just after leaving the Setup Room.
Goldy_Adjusted.pz3 in the same folder shows Goldy after her joint parameters and bones have
been adjusted. Notice how she now moves like the robot she is. Load this file, select each joint,
and note its parameters. Try using the Walk Designer and playing the resulting animation.
The final step is to make Goldy gold. To do this, open the Surface Materials dialog and set the
ambient and reflective colors as follows:
o Red: 255
o Green: 230
o Blue: 75

Set the Reflection Map Stregth to 100% and check the multiply through Object Color box. Render the
scene to see Goldy in all her glory.

08

Using Figure Circles in Poser

What is a figure circle?

The Figure Circle looks like a white or red circle around the figure; you can grab it and drag it around to
move or rotate the figure all at once. The Figure Circle is directly linked to the BODY object- but the
BODY doesn't contain any geometry, it's just a placeholder for the figure to allow operations like scaling
or positioning to affect the entire figure. Also, the Figure Circle doesn't move when you move the hip.
Even with Inverse Kinematics off, the hip can move right outside of the Figure Circle, so if you move
figures around by turning Inverse Kinematics off and dragging their hips, they'll leave their BODY
objects behind, and the Figure Circles will stay stranded with them.

How do I move a figure?

It's easier and better to move figures by selecting the BODY and entering X/Y/Z coordinates directly in
the Parameters Palette, or by dragging their Figure Circles or move the entire figure by selecting any
part of it and dragging across the Translate/Pull tool in the Editing Tools palette as shown in (1) . This
can be done in Top view to position figures; it's fast and doesn't require careful selection or
repositioning the Figure Circle or anything fancy.

What if the figure is already out of the circle?

If a pose in the Library repositions a figure's hips too drastically (if for example the figure was posed by
moving the hip rather than the body), applying that pose can displace the Figure Circle relative to the
figure's position. That unfortunately takes some fixing on the user's part to allow the Figure Circle to
work correctly. It's not too hard though, just turn off Inverse Kinematics, select the Hip and use the
Parameteres Palette to set its XTRAN, YTRAN and ZTRAN parameter values to zero, and the figure will
center itself within the Figure Circle. Then use one of the methods described above to move the figure,
and it should behave properly after that.

09

Using Deformer Magnets in Poser

This document covers the use of Deformer Magnets in Poser, which can be a very powerful tool if their
mechanisms and philosophy are understood. Magnets are useful for creating subtle animations of parts
of the surface of objects (bulges, shakes, swinging, scaling, mouth movements, etc) or they can be used
to alter the appearance of objects by resizing and stretching features. This latter use can additionally be
"captured" into a morph target if you wish.
Requirements: Poser 4 or greater is required.
Magnets are made up of three independent elements in the scene.
This is fundamental to the power of the magnets. By having the defining elements of the magnet be
composed of seperate objects in the scene, you can place them independently into the hierarchy of
Poser objects and use this to your advantage during animation.
A magnet deformer is composed of the following:
1. A Zone Object
2. The Magnet Object
3. The Base Object

The Zone Object

The Zone Object is a spherical object which specifies what vertices of an object (or objects) will be
affected by the magnet deformation. This is essential to understand if you hope to have any control
over magnets. The zone can be made a child of any object in the scene (typically the object you want to
deform). It can be scaled, rotated, and positioned to surround exactly the vertices you want to affect.
And because it is an object in the hierarchy (actually a kind of Prop), it can be independently animated
to change the area to be affected by the magnet over time or it can be set up to stick to an object (its
parent) so that it's area to be affected by a magnet will NOT move.
Now, if every vertex which was in a zone got affected by the full deformation, you would get a sharp
change in surface at the edge of a zone. Because of this, the zone is set up so that vertices near the
center of the zone will get the full effect of the magnet deformation and vertices at the edge of the zone
will get no effect of the magnet. There is a natural falloff of this effect from the center of the zone to the
edge. This falloff can be edited to get exact control over the area of influence. More on that later.

So clearly, how you place a zone will directly affect the kind and look of deformation you will get

The Magnet Object

The Magnet Object is what you actually move to create a change in the surface of your body part or
prop. It's not really a "magnet" in the sense that it doesn't "pull" vertices towards it. If that's what you
expect, then that might explain any confusion to its use.
The magnet is actually a representative object which shows you what the transformation of points
within the zone will be. If you translate the magnet, you will see the vertices within your zone translate.
If you rotate the magnet, you will see your vertices rotate. If you scale the magnet, you will see your
vertices scale.

"Ah, but if I rotate or scale the magnet, where will it be rotating or scaling from ?" you will ask. That's
the essential question and that's where The Base Object comes in...

The Base Object

The base represents the center of transformation. You can place the Base Object anywhere you like and
this will represent the center of rotation and scaling of your deformation. This is an important decision
to make if you are going to rotate or scale your magnet to get a desired effect.
In the following images, the magnet is not changed. Only the base has been moved to the side so that
the center of the transformation is in a different place. Note the effect that the Z rotation of the magnet
has when the base is in different positions:

Pop Quiz
OK. You're ready for the test now. Can you guess how you would want to position the Zone and the
Base if your goal was to be able to bend, stretch, and scale the nose of a figure?
Would the base object be placed at the tip of the nose, the middle of the nose, or the base of the nose?
Would the zone object be centered at the tip of the nose, the middle of the nose, or the base of the
nose?
How might it need to be oriented?
How wide would you make the zone?
Think about this and then go to the next page and see if you came up with the same thoughts.

Pop Quiz Solution

Here's how I would set up a magnet and its zones for manipulating a nose.
I would place the base object at the base of the nose where it joins with the face. The position in Y
would depend on where you want to scale from, but I would guess near the bottom.
The center of the zone I would place at the tip of the nose, and then I'd scale the zone so that the outer
edge of the zone is just hitting the center of the base so that all rotations and scales would fade to nil
just as the verts neared the center of rotation. The zone would probably need to be scaled in Y and
rotated back so it contains the length of the nose and not the lips.
It would look like this:

Now, if you translate the Magnet in Z and/or rotate in X, you will get deformations like these:

Great! Now go have some coffee so you can stay up all night playing with your newfound understanding
of Poser's magnets.

10

Creating Sticker Maps

Poser's Advanced Material Room allows a lot of control over textures- but it's not always obvious how
to set up certain effects. This tutorial shows two ways to overlay one image on another. You can use
these techniques to put logos on a shirt, decals on a car, or eyebrows on a figure's face- it's quite
flexible.
Requirements: Poser 5 or later is required.

The Advanced Material Room: Setup

In this example we'll put a logo on Simon's shirt. Start by locating the image map for the surface that
you want to work with. The T-shirt material uses a separate image map as shown here. We'll open that
image map in Photoshop (you can use any image editor that supports layers.)

Create the Overlay

With the image map open, we'll create our logo on a new layer- position it where you want it to show
up on the shirt, then hide the shirt layer and export the other layer(s) as a new PNG or JPEG file. Here
I'm saving the new file into the same folder as the existing T-shirt material.

Simple Color Math

Now, back in the Material Room, create a new Image Map node (NEW NODE > 2D TEXTURES >
IMAGE_MAP) in the T-shirt material and bring in the new image- called Overlay in this case. All that's
left to do is to hook it into the T-shirt material so it'll render properly. There are several ways to do this
depending on the effect you're going for- the first way works well if you're using a greyscale image for
the overlay. Just create a new Color_Math node (NEW NODE > MATH > COLOR_MATH), set its function
to Multiply, and hook both image maps into it with the color channels set to white, as shown. This is
very simple and prevents 'fringing', but it wouldn't work well for a color image since the colors are set to
Multiply!

Bring Out the Blender

For color overlays it's best to use a Blender node controlled by the grayscale version of the image that
you're using as an overlay. With the two Image Maps in place, create a new Blender node (NEW NODE >
MATH > BLENDER) and a Math_Functions node (NEW NODE > MATH > MATH_FUNCTIONS) and attach
them all as shown here. You can change the level of the Blender and Math_Functions nodes to get the
effect you want- experiment a bit and see what works best. For this example I've set the Blending value
of the Blender node to 1 and the Value_2 setting of the Math_Functions node to 1.5.

By way of explanation, the Math_Functions node strips out the color information in the Overlay image,
converting it to grayscale and allowing it to work as a transparency map. You could if you like also create
an entirely separate grayscale image to control the overlay- this is good if you want to overlay an area
with a pattern or a procedural texture in a specific way. In that case you'd attach the grayscale image to
the Blending channel of the Blender node and go from there.