Grouping Tool: New Group

This is the first tool you will use on most visits to the grouping tool. It allows you to create a new polygon group on any object in Poser. That object can be a prop or a body part in a figure. Your new group will be created empty, waiting for you to add polygons to the group.

When you click on the New Group tool, you will be asked to give your new group a name. Most of the time, your group will only be a temporary tool, created to allow you to do something else, such as alter a material, so the name doesn't matter. Use a meaningful name if you expect to be coming back to this group later, or if you are doing something quite complex to your object. Otherwise, I often accept NewGroup (lazy I know). However, you can't have two groups with the same name, so I'd suggest giving new groups a fairly meaningful name.

In normal use, each polygon can be in several groups. It is possible to find any overlapping polygons using the Show Multifaced Groups option. Unfortunately, you can't make any changes while this option is in use, so once you've had a look around for any overlaps, you'll need to turn this off before you can fix the problem (although for most uses you don't need to bother).

Manually Selecting Polygons

Once you have your new group, you will need to add polygons to that group. There are several different tools that will help with this. Here we will examine the simplest option - manually adding or removing polygons from a group. Figure 1 shows the Add and Remove buttons.

To use this method of adding polygons, you will need to swap to a preview mode that actually shows the polygons. I recommend Hidden Line mode, although any of the lined modes will work.

Fig 1: Add/ Remove Polygon tools

Next, you will want to zoom in on the object or body part that you are working with. Get as close as you can without losing the sight of the overall shape of the object. In Figure 2 I am adding a new group to one of the clothing figures provided with Poser 6, so I have zoomed in on the base of the dress. To select a polygon, you can either click inside the individual poly, or click and drag to select an area. Clicking and dragging is faster, but will only select rectangular areas, so you will probably need to move the camera or object around to line your object up before you can use it.

Fig 2: A new group being created

If you are making a new group on a body part or on part of a complex scene, then you might need to use the Hide other Objects option to see what you are doing.

Uses for your new group

Once you have a new group there are several things you can do with it (each of these uses will be examined in more detail later).

You can apply a new or existing material to the group. This can be a very powerful tool, allowing you to dramatically change the appearance of an item (in this example, I will be creating a hem around the base of the skirt. That hem could be given a different colour or texture, or even made invisible to alter the length of the skirt).

You can create a new prop based on your group. This allows you to extract part of an existing object or body part to use however you want (select the polygons around a figure's eyes, then extract as a new prop to create a simple mask).

In Poser 6 You can apply a smoothing ID to a group. This will alter the way Poser's auto-smoothing works, and can be very useful.

Groups can be used to limit the scope of a magnet, allowing you to make very tightly controled changes to an object.

You can also use groups to create a new posable figure, but more of that later.

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