I tried and tried to learn 'rigging' back in my P_4 days, failed abjectly.

When i upgraded to P_7, I also bought a stack of books. Due family illness and a cascade of PC drive failures etc, I never did install P_7...

Anyhow, I'm having another go at learning rigging with P_11. Having checked there's nothing better, I dusted off those books, found 'Secrets of figure creation' and 'How d'you do that'.

But could I make sense of them ? TSB,NFC...

Then, after it had spent a migraine-inducing month or two atop my frequent-reading pile in washroom, I glanced at 'How' this morning and, to my astonishment, I sorta understood...

'Doing the Workflow' is a different matter, of course, of course, but, hey, got foot onto ladder rung...

Well, other than that 'Aha!' moment, I've been unable to grasp 'rigging' workflow.
Like trying to fork 'pouring sauce'...


Aside from that, I found I was rapidly running out of space on my E: library drive.
Hey, a terabyte should be room enough ?     Seems not.
So, I moved all but CAD-related to F: drive, with a copy to the new 4 TB G: slide-mount...
Took a while, mostly due many small-ish files.    
Didn't really clear much space....
So, today, I moved the P_4+P_10 collection, all 90 GB of it, and the core of my P_11 collection, to the F:drive.
Now E: has ~205 GB free, which should last me a year or so...

Just paid $$$ maintenance contract on our stair-lifts so, even if pending AC3D free-trial goes okay, purchase pushed back to late September...

Fortified by four (4) big mugs of really strong tea, I've made a fresh start on Dad's 'How d'you do that?' rigging tutorial.

The bundled *free* classic UV unwrapper worked okay this time. I've no idea what I'd been doing wrong.

So, I finally had my 'zoned' BoxMan2.OBJ sat in its BoxMan character folder. I checked it with both *free* Prop32Viewer and *free* version of 3DOC.

Then I fired up the bundled PhiBuilder. Error ! Errors !! Many Errors !! Can't find parts of OBJ rArm, lArm etc etc. It showed them in the 'tree', it just could not access them...

Some time later, I found a mention that old PhiBuilder was NOT compatible with Win'10.

And, just after that, I realised I'd been this way before, had bought the upgraded $ version 1.0.0 dated 2011...

 This installed okay, had no problems reading the zoned OBJ.

One small difference: Old PhiB had a 'footer' message window displaying errors. Newer PhiB does not. Well, not yet, as one may pop up when I do something silly...
= =

Why have I found the courage to again try rigging ?

The following cannot be taken as official policy. But, IMHO, the feedback on R**y's 'Official Poser' forum to my repeated grumbles about wonky FBX v7.x rig imports strongly suggests Poser_12 will not be getting a fix.

So, no direct imports of rigged 'MakeHuman' FBX figures, and no ports from XPS (XNA/Lara) or PMX (MMD except TDA) without a total re-rig...

New PHIBuilder makes it very too easy to accidentally overwrite the zoned OBJ with the PHI info, as both are text files. Use 'Save As' and Mind Your Options...

I had to back-track and again 'zone' the original OBJ.

This time, Poser was able to import the Hier file, grok the PHI.

And, wonder of wonders, the figure could be posed.

One puzzle: Although there are 7 parts, they still only have one (1) material. Will investigate. Hmm. Even bouncing via 3DOC and allocating 11 materials (due double-sided parts) and generating an MTL, still only one (1) material to set in Poser's material room. Oh, plus a Preview...

For now, I added a woody texture from another model to smarten 'Mr Boxxequin', did a quick render in Superfly...