I've been scratching my head about how come Victoria can look OK in Poser, but when I export and bring her into trueSpace she has texture mapping problems around the eyes. I finally figured out that she has redundant geometry! The same verticies and polygons appear multiple times, with different texture mapping in each instance. For example, if I just export the eyes, I get the whole spheres associated with the material "Eyeballs", then most of the same verticies and polygons again with the material "Eyewhites", and another subset of the same with material "Irises", and yet another repeated subset with material "Pupils". All of the visible parts of the eyeballs are represented by multiple identical polygons, and God Only Knows how Poser manages to render the right ones. Has anybody tried rendering Victoria in a different program? What kind of results did you get? Jude

I think, for the eyes anyway, that some of the redundancy is rendered transparent with specularity only. People have successfully rendered her in Bryce. The model is unusual, but the possibilities are nice. -sk

Well, that was a useful clue. I had checked for the use of transparency maps, and I seen one used for the eyelashes, but I hadn't noticed that some of the materials had the transparency sliders cranked to make them always transparent. I turned on raytracing in TS so I'd get full transparency support, and that helped a lot. Thanks for the idea. I still think the bit with the eyeballs is goofy, and it's particularly vexing because trueSpace doesn't have a direct way to access it's materials list: I have to click on a polygon that uses that material. That doesn't work very well when multiple polygons coexist in exactly the same space. Grrrrrr......

I'm not argueing with the effect it's intended to create. I just think the way it was done is a kludge. I'll bet TS isn't the only rendering engine that gets confused when encountering multiple exactly coincident polygons.

I've had very difficult issues with her in Carrara. Related to the eyes in fact. They seem to be there doubly... With the outer set mostly transparent and somewhat shiny... It's very annoying. I understand it may make it look better in Poser with it's primative renderer... but it causes all sorts of issues when you user poser to pose her for a scene your building in some other application...

Personally, I think Vickie's the ugliest poser model I've ever seen, To have that body she has to be about 7 feet tall. But I have seen some good results when people have completely morphed her. I'm starting to think she wasn't made to be used as the default figure, but was meant to be a morph target.

If you have Truespace or 3Ds, once you imported her for q scene, if you're not going to modify her, couldn't you use the program to reduce the vertices?

Don't sell Truespace Short :-) Use the "Decompose Into Objects" tool. It will split the mesh right up into individual materials! So there!, Allie! - SMT

"Decompose Into Objects" Is that like a technofreak way of saying 'ungroup'? LOL

Hi Smallspace, and thanks for the hint. Yes, "Decompose into objects" would help - if there were a reverse operation that reassembled the object into a single mesh. The TS rendering engine is one of the ones that doesn't smooth across mesh boundaries, and if I break up Victoria I can see the seams in the renderings. I can deal with this problem by other means now that I know what it is. I was just sorely puzzled by the weird results until I figured out what was causing them, and I posted my message mostly in an attempt to save other people from wasting time on the same puzzle. PJF, "Decompose into objects" is what Caligari calls that tool. I'll admit it has a technoid ring to it, but it's actually a fair description of what the tool does. I think the term "ungroup" is just as much a jargon term as the longer name. Jude

Hi again Smallspace. Maybe I spoke too soon (a congential defect, I think). I've usually tried to keep Poser models as single meshes in trueSpace because of the lack of smoothing across mesh boundaries. If I preserve the Poser body part structure in trueSpace, the renderings look like something from Doc Frankenstein's lab. However, preserving the body part structure is NOT the same as "Decompose into objects", because most of the body's skin is a single material and that remains a single mesh after "Decompose". Almost all of the mesh breaks made by "Decompose" are places where a visible boundary is expected anyway. I don't know why I didn't think of this before. It sure seems obvious after the fact. Thanks for the help breaking my mental logjam.