If you have not yet read the chapters on Named Structures, you should at least thumb through them. Generally, the posing works independently of the Named Structures, but these can be used to effectively limit the recording or application of a pose.
Limitations of the posing principle
Posing is the recording of a body posture by storing all the single joint rotations and translations. Cinema 4D supports posing in the module MOCCA by the pose manager. Why then do we need another posing solution, especially since the pose manager offers nifty features like a preview image or the storing of poses on point level?
An obvious answer would be that MOCCA is an optional module that has been designed primarily for character animation. People who don't own MOCCA, for example because they design industrial and mechanical animations instead of characters, don't have any way to pose their models. However, posing is not just of interest for bones and characters but for technical objects as well. The posing module of the Collie Tools has been programmed with exactly this application in mind.
Moreover, MOCCA is not suitable for every purpose. The pose manager is supposed to work with finished figures and bone animations. For that end, all positions of all "joints" are recorded - where any group of objects forms an animation-capable joint. For finished and boned models, this is no problem. If you perform structural changes on the model however, after recording poses, then the poses become worthless because there are no data for the new joints, or data from deleted joints are applied to the wrong object.
Example: This simple "robot arm" has been recorded in two poses. After that, the model is changed by adding a number of small boxes to the lower arm. Following this modification, the second pose is applied in a wrong way:
Why? Very simple: The connection to the new boxes is seen as a "joint" as well. If the pose manager now starts to apply the stored joint data to the object, it will find the boxes where no object has been before, and try to project the rest of the arm data to these new objects. This attempt must fail, naturally, since the hierarchy of objects is different.
In character animation, this problem is relatively insignificant, since the structure of a finished and rigged (equipped with bones) character is rarely changed. In industrial animation, this is a common problem: a common base model of a six-axis robot gets a new switchbox, a new hose packet, new sensors - and suddenly, defined process poses that have been stored through the pose manager won't work any more. As further difficulty, the pose manager stores all "joints" - this, too, is no problem in character animation, where the whole bone skeleton is animated and posed, but makes no sense in mechanical animations. Here, only the robot's six axes are posed, and all other data regarding object connections are superfluous and maybe even counterproductive.
The pose manager is not able to solve that problem, since C4D views any object connection as an animation-capable joint. The posing of the Collie Tools offers a completely different solution that uses tags to define joints, and allows limiting the recording and application of poses through Named Structures.