I am attempting to create some Poser room 'figures' but am coming across some problems with the Poser render engine that are proving frustrating. I wonder if anyone has any advice.

1. To overcome the problems shading flat faces - for example walls - I have split the vertices on my model. However, this leads to curved surfaces requiring lots of polygons to make them appear smooth (increasing the size of the model).

2. Because Poser uses infinite parallel lights I have disabled shadows for the room figure, however this decreases realism when lighting a scene. I could remove a wall, but this becomes harder when you have coving, skirting boards, dado rails and windows all 'crossing' or forming part of a wall.

3. I have found that often when rotating a scene the bounding boxes do not appear to exactly match the location of the objects they represent. Is this normal? Also polygon clipping seems very poor, both in the editor and when rendering.

4. When rendering, large polygons are not clipped correctly leading to gaps in the model. The only way to overcome this seems to be to split the polygons to make them smaller (see render).

5. It appears to be difficult to light this type of model using the Poser lights - do most people find this?

6. Because of the size of walls, etc I use repeating textures to keep texture sizes manageable. This leads to most features in the room being assigned a separate texture map. While this is more flexible, it can lead to longer set up times and goes against the 'norm' of a single texture for a single figure. Is this acceptable for marketplace items and will this annoy people?

All in all, I believe you can get much better results using other 3D packages (see my gallery for a Cinema 4D render of the same room model), but Poser is a big market and people seem to love buying stuff for it - so I am trying to optimise things as much as I can to get good results. What do people think of the Poser model so far?

Finally, the comments above apply to my experiments using Poser 4. Would I be able to get better results using Poser 5?

Hi Dr Max. I can only answer 1 of those questions (and that answer is a direct quote from Dr Geep - I can take no credit) regarding hard+soft vertices: 1. Split all the vertices. 2. Then make a group and include the ones you want to have soft edges and make a New Prop "A"(soft). Export this and then import it with "Weld..." checked. Now this group will have "soft" edges. 3. Also, make a New Prop "B" (hard) for the rest of the object excluding the group that you used in #2. 4. Export both New Props "A" (soft) and "B" (hard) and then import it with "Weld ..." UNchecked. Note - If you UNcheck everything (except "Weld..." if required) when you import, the object will remain the same size and stay in exactly the same position as it was when you exported it. Hope that helps some:-) BTW - if you also repost this in the main Poser forum you'll probably get a lot more help, from those who are far more knowledgeable than I am. VERY imposing hallway, btw.. Cheers, Diolma

Yes, it is impressive....I like this view...Sharen

Thanks for the quick responses. I'll try posting in the main Poser Forum too.

In UV Mapper Pro you can have one object, and split only some of the vertices and leave others welded. Worth the money for UV Mapper pro for this feature alone.