Poser really is giving me a hard time not to hate it tonight. Please looks at this. The picture above is just a screenshot from the scene BEFORE rendering. The picture below is the rendered result of just the scene that can be seen on the photo above. As you can see the broom and the corners of the desks are blown up like balloons. Why does something like this happen? What can I do against it? Why does my poser hate me so much? :(

Turn off "smooth polygons" in the render dialogue (firefly) or in the individual object parameters (located in the properties tab of the parameter dials window).

Message edited on: 08/25/2004 16:12

Blimey, so it was not a bug but a feature? ;) Does anyone understand the theory behind this??? Thank you very much for your quick help, maxxxmodelz!

Understand, yes. Explain it without diagrams, no. :/

Attached Link: http://www.keindesign.de/stefan/poser/renderer.html

Here's an explaination of it (and other features of Firefly) on Stewer's website.

Basically, it's a render feature that's useful for giving a smooth appearance to low-poly objects that contain hard edges. Instead of, for instance, having to smooth the mesh by adding more complexity (polygons).

Message edited on: 08/25/2004 16:42

A (very) simple explanation is that some objects are smoothed more than they should be.

Heh, this is one of the major pains in the butt with Poser. Because you can't set any smoothing angles manually , modelling for Poser can be a right pain. Split vertices here, don't split them there. Test render - doh - doesn't work. Back into the modelling software - rejoin these, split those instead, gah.

You don`t actually have to use smooth polygon a lot of the time, you would be better using it only when you need it.

I only use it for organic characters. For anything else, I always turn it off.

I once took shameless advantage of the ballooning effect when modeling a simple sandcastle prop. Saved me a lot of work.

It's not only to save work but to also save resources. How many polygons would it take to do this without smooth polys & displacements?

This one's 56 polygons.

Stewer... do I want to know WHAT that thing is?! ;o) Seriously, it's an impressive example of the strength of displacement maps and the smoothing in P5

That thing - that has no meaning, it's just what I came up in a few minutes to have something to show ;) I think the most impressive examples of displacement that we saw recently were given with the ZBrush release. They also have a guidebook that shows how to use ZBrush-created displacements in Poser 5.

...that's a very nice looking turd ;)