Until now, you can do: - join vertices - delete faces - convert four side face to triangle - convert triangle faces to four side - invert face normal - create faces - convert faces with more than 4 sides to triangles - invert all mesh normals I want suggestions of more functions that will be useful

The original mesh

After some vertices joined

How about the ability to select ONE polygon and have the program align the normals so that they fit that one. That's a function I miss in UVMapper. You can invert normals there but if they're randomly jumbled you're out of luck.

If you have a mesh that has been made two sided (as per UV mapper) would it be possible to make it single sided? I reckon you would need to select which side of each polygon you wanted to keep. Looks good.

Poser actually ignores normals as far as I know; it works out which way a polygon is facing from the winding order (the order in which the vertex coordinates are called up). Something to make winding order consistent would be grand, but it's really quite difficult to do. You as a human being can easily see what is the inside of your model and what is the outside, but a computer program will struggle to work this out... My suggestions: - It should be able to read Poser files with embedded geometry (CR2, HR2, PP2) as well as OBJ, if it doesn't already. - Maybe some general scale/translate/rotate/mirror functions? - The ability to weld coincident or nearly coincident vertices (with a sphere of influence parameter) would be very useful. - and lots of other things I haven't thought of yet, but will do as soon as I click on 'Post Reply'. :D

In my utility you can select any polygon with wrong normals and then invert them. Often 3ds meshes have some faces with inverted normals and also duplicated faces that render black in Poser. You can select these faces and invert or delete them. It must be done by hand one by one, no authomatic procedure can be done, but is very easily done by this program unless you have 50000 faces to correct!

Transforming double sided polys into single sided ones would be a great help in Poser 5 cloth room : it only works with single sided polys, so you cannot use some ancient clothes with double sided polys in it.

How is this Poser?

Thinking futher on how to select one side. Would it be possible to select a polygon (using vertex normal) and then have the program work through and find adjacent polygons with the a very similar normal (the other normal of a two sided poly side would be 180 degrees reversed). Let's say you accept that an adjacent poly, with a normal up to 44 degrees different from the current poly, can be considered as being on the same side. Some method of manual editing would definitely be required, as the above method would 'fail' at a 90 degree (or greater) angle betwwen two poly's on the same side. But angle > 90 can create artifacts in Poser renders anyway due to it's attempt to 'round' the model. Just a thought. Ian

It's Poser coz it has to do with making stuff FOR Poser. What a remark....

Oh ok, I just didn't understand

The problem with two sided polygons only happens if the front and back faces share the same vertices. If the front and back faces points to different vertices in the vertex list, there's no problem even if the front and back have vertices with the same numerical value, so in this case, you can't import into Poser with the option of weld identical vertices. You can find authomaticaly double sided faces just looking for faces that have exactly the same vertex indexes, you can then remove one of the faces, but which one?....

Looks like a very handy tool! If it had a "find duplicates" option (like UVMapper Pro) I think it would be even more helpful, especially if you could then delete all the duplicates. As I understand it, double sided polys in most programs are really duplicated polys with the normals reversed on one set - at least according to UVMapper - Lightwave is one of the few programs that actually support true double-sided polys. In other words, when you make a polygon mesh "double-sided" the programs like UVMPro, it is actually duplicating the geometry and flipping the normals on the newly created polys. This can quickly result in bloating the geometry and doubling the processor load to Poser. Some people do this as an expedient way of solving problems with the normals without realizing that they are creating additional mesh. It is much better to use a tool such as this to just correct the normals. Thanks, kawecki - it will be usefull indeed.