Now that you are animating, you may want to use props to guide your animations.
Warning: The following contains explicit images of cartoon sex.

Here are a couple of examples of why you might like to use props:

As you can see, aligning figures to props, or aligning props when attached to figures can be interesting in a variety of situations.

Here’s how these situations look in Poser.

Let’s talk about each of these cases in detail. But first, let’s talk about another limitation of Poser.

Poser Does Not Understand Sizes
Poser does not understand a fixed size of anything. Or at least Poser does not expose the actual size of anything to the user. So you cannot control the fixed size of any prop or any figure. This may have been ok back in Poser 4 days, when Poser was used alone. But as soon as Poser can export things to an outside world, then size becomes important. The difficulty of size becomes apparent when we build a prop in Poser and then have to recreate that prop in SL to match the animation. Since you cannot set the size of anything, or know the size of anything in Poser, you don’t know how big to make anything in SL to match it. Making the dildo or vibrator props for these animations is a matter of try and adjust until you get something right.

Posing against a Fixed Prop.
The Vibrator is an example of posing against a fixed prop. The vibrator is a cylinder in Poser and just creates a surface against which the figure is posed as she moves. Another example is sex against a wall. The simplest example is posing against the floor, but the floor - ground plane - is always present in Poser, so this does not need to be created.

Use Poser to create the props, or create the props in another tool such as 3dsMAX and then import them. It should actually be possible to create a prop in 3dsmax using SLPrims and then change those to mesh and export them as a 3ds file, and then import that file into Poser. Quite complex props can be created in this way, with direct translation into Second Life. Except for size of course. You will still have to fiddle with size when you get into Second Life.

BTW, as you can see, the vibrator scene has two things that are unnecessary when using Poser for SL. (1) The figure is a high-rez figure, and (2) The face has been animated. I was just experimenting and my system is quite powerful, so this is not an issue, but it’s also not a feature. You don’t need to waste your time with either of these for working on animations for SL.

Posing with Attached Props
The Dildo scene uses attached props. Just to review how these work in Poser:

1. create the props in Poser and figures from the prop section. It will be good duplicate any copies you will need at this stage, and to name the prop to identify it with the figure that it will eventually attach to.
2. then size and position the prop next to the hand or other body part of the Poser figure. You need to adjust the position before you do the next step, since once you attach it to a hand, moving the prop will move the hand as well.
3. then open the Hierarchy panel in Poser and move the prop to a child of the appropriate body part of the figure.
4. At this point the prop should move along with the poser figure body part to which it is attached.

As you continue to pose the character, you don’t want to go back and move the prop. Once you bring the animation into SL and create and “wear” the prop, you will need to edit the prop so that the animations look correct in SL, and you don’t want a series of animations to require edits of the attachments.

As an example, in the series of Dildo animations, the attachment of the dildo props in poser did not change throughout the entire set of animations. This was accomplished by saving a template scene that was used to start each animation.

Next will talk about using Poser Physics.