Pose System

Messiah's Pose System is a quick way to store and retrieve poses for your characters. It works in conjunction with Groups (sometimes called Character Groups) and the World Menu (see bottom of page). Ideally, at least for a character rig, all of the items responsible for putting the character into that pose should be part of the Group (and it must be the Primary Group) For example, if the hands and feet are not in the same Primary group, it will be impossible to store a pose for the entire character.

What is this here Pose system then?
Well actually it's an amalgamation of several pose systems that enable you to do things in just the way you want to.

Ok, that's it. If you make me ask you one more time how I use it...
Eyh, chillax, I was just getting to that.
Ok, if you want to use the messiah interface:
1. Make a group of your character animatable items that you want to pose.
2. Select your animatable group at the top of your item list.
3. Right click anywhere in the world view that does not contain an armature or an item.
4. Pick 'New Pose' at the bottom of the right click menu and click your group and 'ok'.
5. At any time when you want your pose to be brought back up, right click in your world view without hitting an armature or an item.
6. Select Paste pose and pick your old pose. This way whenever you want, you can store and load poses.

But what about those cool armatures, surely they can be made to do all those things in a way cooler way?
Yeah actually. If you make an armature and make a click action for the handle that is AP_CopyPose you can create nice interfaces for bringing up and storing different poses in negative frames. If you set the option to be current -> backup, it will copy the frame you have currently to the selected backup frame for the entire specified group. If you selected to do the opposite action it will copy the entire group out of the negative frame and into the current one.

Create a Group that consists of the object you would like to pose. You can do this from the World Menu, or Compose Groups, or SetupGroups.
Pose your character.
In the World Menu, choose New Pose. In the Create Pose pop-up, type a descriptive name for the pose and press OK (or press Enter twice). The pose for that character on that frame will now be stored. Important: The Pose system works best when the Channel Group is set to Motion or Synchronized Channel Group. This ensures that you will get keyframes on the channels necessary to recreate the pose. (The Pose system respects the Channel Group setting.)

Additional Info: The poses are actually Motion Clips. You can rename them and delete them from there. They are on the Clips sub-tab in Compose.

World Menu: The World Menu is accessed by right-clicking in the World View (when the World Menu option is turned on).