This was just so weird I had to share it. Was trying to make a jagged rectangle for the Talk-Bubble stuff. I used a feature of Amapi that I'd never tried before, and here's the result in Poser. Upper is preview mode, lower is render. Can't you just hear the poor old rendering engine groaning and squeaking as it tries to make some sense out of this horrible collection of vertices and facets?

OOhhh nice..! Will it be for sale in the Market Place or maybe a Crismouse Freebie..?

It does look sort of Christmassy,
doesn't it?

Like a Christmas tree that's been drinking
too much LSD-soaked eggnog.

Message edited on: 12/08/2004 00:21

LSD-soaked eggnog... now there's something that sounds like it could liven up the holiday! Count me in!! I'll bring the PCP-laced fruit cake! ;-)

The Tension-Tamer tea that I'm drinking has catnip in it. (If I don't sip it while hot, I have to fight Skrogg for it later.) That would take the jaggies off that bubble quite nicely, I think. ;^)

**Wants to play the "What do you see when you look at it game". It looks like one of those Chinese Dragon's to me! LOL!

This is P5, right? Maybe you have doublesided faces here. Just inject a little displacement mapping (0.001 or so). The render engine will like it better. Kind regards, Willy

Don't worry, I wasn't really asking for assistance.... I knew the only answer was to rebuild the prop itself.

Ouch! Well, sometimes I'm standing on the hose pipe ... ;-) Willy

It actually looks somewhat like a shrubbery. Add it to the "Knights Who Say Ni!" package and you've got a sure thing.

.

You are probably going to "fix" it, but it has a certain charm as is. I can see it used as an effect with cartoon dragons or anime spell-casters.

I've had Amapi do some strange things like that when I tried to make a text object to import into Poser... don't remember what I did exactly. And, speaking from unfortunate experience, I would NOT mix LSD and PCP... shiver; I still have flashbacks almost 20 years later.

Amapi 7 just doesn't play nicely with Poser at all. The front face of its text objects is one wildly complex facet, which causes Poser's renderer to weave and dart all over the place like a crack ho posing for a mug shot. You can tesselate the facet, but it's really not worth the trouble. (Whether tesselating the ho would be worth the trouble is a matter of personal preference.) I solved this problem by starting with a Grid and pulling its outer edges into a zigzag. Amapi's Grid is an excellent starting point for any mainly flat object. And yes, I'm also drawing from unfortunate personal experience here! Haven't had flashbacks in a long time ... unless it's reached the point where everything is a flashback, in which case I wouldn't know the difference anyway. :)