Grouping Tool: Add a new material to a prop

Props are easier to work with using the grouping tool than figures, because you don't have any of the problems created by separate body parts. Adding new material zones to a prop is a very powerful tool, dramatically increasing the flexibility of your props.

Fig 1: Poserworld Stool

In this tutorial I am going to add a new 'seat' material to the Poserworld Stool shown in figure 1. This will allow us to design one material for the seat and another for the legs.

1. Place your prop in an empty scene.
2. Move that prop as close to the middle of the scene as possible - this makes it much easier to move around the prop, as the Poser cameras rotate around that point.
3. Turn off ground shadows (Display Menu, Ground Shadows option) as they get in the way when you are working on the base of a prop.
4. Select the Grouping Tool.
5. Create a new group. Give it a meaningful name, as you will be saving this prop back to the library
6. Select all of the polygons in the seat using whatever method you prefer. For this prop, I used the Front and Back camera views, and clicked and dragged to select all of the polys on front and back in one go.
7. Once you are happy with your group, select Assign Material and type in your new material name. Again, pick something meaningful here - I chose 'seat'.
8. Close the grouping tool to see the results of your effort. The Seat will now be displayed in a different material to the legs.
9. Save your new prop back to the library using a new name.

Fig 2: Seat as a new group

Figure 2 shows the seat selected as a new group (step 6 in the instructions). Now you have your new material, you will need to create a suitable material. In Figure 3 I have simply copied the existing wooden material from the legs to the new 'seat' material, then changed the diffuse colour to red. You can create whatever material you need.

Fig 3: A new seat