Now free as of yesterday, GroBot for Poser by Sci-Kwon-Do (Michael Seiber). A super-flexible super-morphable Poser toon robot character. Commercial use is kindly retained on making the character a freebie. In the large mix of shapes, there’s a nice toon cat-bot.
When the maker was selling this character on Renderosity, he stated it “doesn’t work properly” in Poser 11. I installed anyway, a simple copy/paste/merge of the runtime folder in the .ZIP. I then loaded Poser 11 and found the character’s parts under ‘GroBot’. As far as I can tell it’s just the preset poses that sort-of don’t work, and there’s an easy workaround for them.
The base figure loads fine from GroBot in Poser 11. All her Poses, Characters and MATs are found under various ‘GroBot’ folders. ‘Kitty Stand’ and ‘Kitty Squat’ characters work fine in terms of auto-application of the Kitty morph, but then adding any other new pose reverts her morphs to the standard GroBot robot shape. I guess this is the problem with Poser 11. However, there’s an easy workaround for this slight problem.
GroBot is quite a dramatic demo of how a character might make extreme morph changes and take extreme poses and yet remain smooth in Poser. One finds the morph dials by selecting the body and finding the ‘FBM’ Morph dials. “Kit-10” is the Kitty cat morph and it’s easy to control. Simply re-apply this morph to a set body pose, to get the Kitty feature back on the body again after applying a preset pose. You can also flatten the chest by slightly tweaking the ‘Gro-illa’ dial.
As you might expect, with her black MAT on she doesn’t respond well to Poser 11’s Comic Book Preview mode in b&w inks. But put the pink MAT on and she looks superb in that mode…
All the above pictures are in real-time Preview mode.
So, she works great in Poser 11, you just need to apply a little workaround when working with the preset poses. She doesn’t appear to accept any preset poses except her own, though some from other characters will move her arms, others her legs. The maker states “have limits turned ON, and IK turned off”, so that may help with third-party poses.
As a Kitty she could probably use a tail, but I recall noticing that she has a flexible ‘whip’ prop and that could probably serve.
Update: There’s a patch, Grobot For Poser 11, making her work better in Poser 11. Though you’ll want to read the readme.txt first. I did and I decided I’d stick with the original and my workarounds for now.