Hi,

I've posted the following to the Poser Technical forum, but someone suggested I might get a better response if I post it here too. So here goes ...

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?

Poser 5 is a whole different ball game. New Render Engine. New Material Room including Ray Trace reflections,etc. Collision Detection.... the list goes on. Try out Poser 5, it's cool.

okies first get a copy of VUmapper Pro - this allows you to split vertices selectively - EG - you can split the flat walls off and leave the rest curved ;)

Hi, I'm a buyer not a modeler. If I bought a model like that (which I would love) I would put my poser figure and props in so they're the right scale (usually automatic with poser stuff), then dress and pose my figure. Then I save the PZ3 and bring the entire thing into vue de'sprit where I do the lighting and render it. Love esther

1. Don't split the vertices on the curved areas, just on the areas you need to be flat. Specifically, only split them at the borders of flat areas. Most modellers allow you to split at a certain angle. If you split anything that makes an angle of 46 degrees or more from the continuation of bordering polygons, you should get pretty good results. Alternatively, bevel the edges of flat areas and don't split anything. This adds a few polygons but works well. 2. Yeah, welcome to the ugly world of Poser lighting. The trick for lighting rooms is to use lots of spotlights. It's hard work. You can also provide ambient lighting by turning off shadows for one or more of the infinite lights. 3. Yes, it's normal. Polygon clipping is usually pretty good at render time though. If you're having trouble at render time, you may have some double sided polygons or multiple polygons occupying the same space. The Poser render engine hates that. It also hates polygons with any concave angles. From the look of the pic you posted, you may well have one of those on the floor. Try splitting it into all convex polygons, ideally with no more than four sides each. 4. see 3 5. You betcha. 6. Yes it's acceptable. Possibly some people may be annoyed by it, but more fool them. It's the sensible approach. Yes, you can get better results with other packages. You can pay 10 to 50 times as much for them too. Would you be able to get better results with Poser 5? Well, that really depends on what you want to achieve. Lighting is no better in P5 than it is in P4 so there's no advantage there. I think light gels were about the only thing that was added to lighting features. Texturing on the other hand is much more flexible in P5. It has a very advanced procedural shader system with raytracing, displacement mapping and improved bump mapping. The displacement mapping strikes me as the most obvious advantage for you. It would allow you to add complex plaster moulding, such as floral patterns, to your ceilings for example, without any additional polygons. You could also generate things like marble tiling, pavers or bricks procedurally. Specular highlights are handled a lot better in P5 too (much better control over size and brightness) and you can set up specular maps if you want them.

If you're using UVMapper Classic for splitting and therefore cannot select individual sections, use Poser's grouping tool to select and then spawn new props from those sections. You can break up the mesh into curved and flat sections in this manner, and export/process/reimport the pieces as necessary.

1. If you make a setup for poser 5 you can use poser 5 materials (even in p4 renderer) to do repeating textures. Sadly this won't work in P4 or P4 pro. I am all for efficient texture use. Using a small 128x128 repeating hatched texture vs a huge 2048x2048 texture is far better. Also, can I ask why make these things figures? Instead how about a construction set with wall segments, floors, doors etc. This way people can set up the walls the way they want and hide parts for camera shots. I like that you made the hallways real wide. Makes posing a camera a lot easier.

I WANT THAT ROOM! (hotel or whatever) It looks cool. You can map it to use a repeating pattern in P4 too. I can't offhand remember how it's made and I haven't got UVMapper here (at work) but I know it's possible. Not sure if you need UVMapper Pro for it though or Classic will do it. Also by setting up material zones you can make selected walls and stuff invisible to ease camera placement. Oh and I second Mason: Make this a modular thing, you CAN make a PZ3 or something that loads it all at once but modular stuff greatly increases useability.

Out of interest, some thought son lights. The default set of 3 infinite lights are pretty useless for this kind of set (actually for quite a lot of uses!). Traditionally one is told that to be used one has to set the walls to not cast shadows, or place the lights almost vetrically (casting small but unusually dark shadows due to lack of radiosity or similar). Obviously even in this scenario the floor and ceiling would still have to be set to not cast shadows. Many local spotlights, places within the room can much more accurately create the kind of effect one generally wants of such a scene, but as has been noted can be something of a chore to set up. NB one creates a light THEN changes it to the kind of light one wants. I can't help but wonder, mildly, if anyone has tried setting up any kind of light to cast a fraction of a shadow rather than making walls not cast shadows. Say, set the "Shadow" dial to 0.5, or 0.25. That way we'd get partially lit shadows, wouldn't we, even from just a few infinite lights? Food for thought, something to play around with when I've got more time... Cheers, Cliff

Attached Link: http://www.cgtalk.com/showthread.php?s=&threadid=127334

Maybe this link helps.

Hmmm, nice examples stewer. Some other thoughts: Don't be surprised if someone yells "Hey, this is free peer support not free product development" and points you towards a forum which isn't commercial-free. Hollywood and TV have long understood and worked around some of the problems we have with "!virtual sets" in Poser. For example... "The Shot" (or shots) when it/they come won't be about your room. Especially if you're planning on selling it to "the public". IF they render your room as the focus of the image then IMHO something has gone wrong somewhere. Poser is based on the initial concept of "Posing" a human being (which has been somewhat expanded upon to include non-human beings and even architecture, to a point). To produce GOOD credible images of characters one needs to place them in good credible sets, but bearing in mind the idea that the camera will tend to focus on the being might help the focus of the room design. For example: TV/Movies often don't show the ceiling. This is because most TV/Movies don't have ceilings, they have taller-than-usual walls and an open gap at the top to allow for their lights. TV/Movies often don't have 4 walls on a room. This is because the camera and camera crew take up a certain amount of room, and a camera placed within a room can easily miss most of the room. So the 2fourth wall" is often virtual. Like TV/Movies but more so, CGI images often contains what is shown and little else. Everything you put in a 3D scene takes memory and CPU time - if it's not going to show (even in reflections, or shadows) then consider whether it's REALLY needed or not (this makes a "modular" approach to room building attractive for users). Everything else I can think of seems to have been covered in this thread or stewer's link already (including the comment that the sides of the windows could do with being brighter if they're a source of light - in both the Poser and C4D images). Cheers, Cliff

First of all, thanks for all the feedback from everyone. There are some excellent points in the replies.

As I have written the software that creates the model - I am the one who has to sort out the problems with the export to Poser! It seems from Ajax's comments (and others) that a few of my solutions need to be refined. Particularly the code that splits all the vertices to overcome shading problems and the use of double sided polygons.

ernyoka1 : What are material zones and how can they be used to make sections of the model invisible?

Other peoples comments have helped me understand how people might want to use a room in Poser. Also it nice to know I'm not the only one cursing Poser's lighting setup!

who3d : I realise that this is a support forum not a product development forum and know that some might feel my questions are inappropriate. So, thanks to everyone for their help and thank you for not getting annoyed about my questions.

who3d, your insight into the TV film approach to scenes and lighting was really useful. Many thanks for this feedback. I guess the film guys have solved a lot of similar issues.

Finally, I am glad people like the look of the room. It makes me feel that I am not wasting my time pursuing this project.

Regards - Max

'I can't help but wonder, mildly, if anyone has tried setting up any kind of light to cast a fraction of a shadow rather than making walls not cast shadows' Yep, I have. I have a room system available commercially and one lighting setup uses spots for the main lights, plus an infinite 'fill' light, set at a low intensity, but with shadows switched off. This fills in the whole room, but doesn't detract from the main spots. DrMax, Your room looks excellent. Re ernyoka's comment about material zones, she's referring to using the transparency values in poser. By setting a material to 100% transparency, you can make it invisible in a render. This has 2 disadvantages though. One is that the material may be shared by several parts of the prop or figure and maybe you don't want to make them all transparent. The other snag is that when a material is transparent, it still shows in the preview as tiny dots. Not a major problem, but it can be annoying. I find it better just to switch body parts/props off. There's one thing you may want to try. All the walls in my room have an inner and outer material, with the outer material set to 100% transparency by default. This allows the user to look 'through' the wall from the outside. Very handy when setting up cameras. But, of course, you have to switch the wall off before rendering, because the inside isn't transparent. The pic shows the transparent effect. mac

Mac it was actually your double-sided trick I had in mind, I just couldn't remember HOW exactely it was made, or by whom :o) As for the line between commercial and non commercial posts here, it's often a thin one :o)