Here's an example. This exactly the same camera angle and distance, nothing changed in between. On left a normal-looking basic 'Poser4' render. On right an odd-looking OpenGL preview. Now why does it look this bad? If I go closer with the camera she looks a whole lot better also in preview. Jessi can look odd too (this is Kate, the P6 girl) but not as bad. It's mostly her teeth that shine through, not the eyes quite as much. I suppose it has to do with the OpenGL driver or the way P6 uses that driver. But does it really have to look THIS bad?

FishNose, try playing with the Yon setting in the camera (if your using OpenGL "hardware" rendering) and see what happens.

Hmm, very interesting Neth..... I get a kind of 'slice' effect, the bad-looking slice wanders through her face in cycles as I dial up or down. But the effect never disappears, only shifts along the z axis in a rather shallow cycle. :] Fish

'Odd' is putting it mildly. 'Scary', more like. Seems that the screwed-up parts are those with transparency?

FishNose, What is your graphics card?

ockham, no, it's not transparency. The eyes, for instance, have no transparency applied, nor does her head. If I go closer with the camera she looks a whoe lot better. It's as if the 'resolution' in terms of axis units is severely limited. nerd - it's an NVidia GeForce4 Ti4600, highly stable. Fairly recent drivers, about 2 months old. Win2K. :] Fish

Maybe she just surprise that you have OpenGL...LOL...

Well, that card should be supported. Definitely file a bug on this one. Just for giggles what do the isometric cameras look like? Nerd3D

I'm using a ti4200 so you're a bit past me :) I decided to go with the minimal driver that gives good opengl support and so I'm using the 52.16 one. No problems at all so far. I was using the latest ones but either they are buggy or my machine didn't like them because I got a spontaneous reboot, so I went back a few versions.

Maybe it's doing some sort of on the fly mesh decimation for the preview? Selectively dropping small polys as distance from camera increases? I've noticed in vue that the reduced resolution immediate draw images often show this sort of effect (mostly to an even greater extreme where often all that's left of the head is eyes and teeth)

its a clipping effect, Open GL has trouble at certain distances dealing with mesh that is very close together, so sometimes the wrong mesh will be drawn in front. as you bring the camera closer the percentage of distance grows so the problem dissapears, this happens with a lot of programs using Open GL to some extent. this happened a lot in earlier versions of DAZ Studio.

Like wdupre said, this happens a lot in DAZ Studio (still happens to me with the latest release). Good to know that it's not a software-specific problem though, thank you for explaining. SnowS

I think the reasons it happens so easily in Poser and Studio is the scale they use, most 3d software uses a much larger scale, you often have to scale up figures 1000 percent to work with them easily in modern modelers, and it has been noticed by many in the community that there are rendering benifits to scaling figures even in the Firfly renderer.

FishNose, you're on the right track. In OpenGL, the resolution of the zbuffer (for sorting polygons back to front) is in fact limited. How limited depends on the card and the driver. Hence Netherworks' suggestion to tweak the Yon, because the less depth the scene has, the less zbuffer resolution is needed. Not sure why adjusting the yon doesn't help, but bringing the camera closer essentially does the same thing.

Just had an idea, there are some advanced settings in the properties of the GeForce cards. Try setting the "Image Settings" to the highest quality.

Nerd3D

Message edited on: 03/23/2005 23:26

Some very interesting stuff turning up here. Thanks guys. zbuffer.... aha.... Can one change the size of the zbuffer, or some kind of quality setting on it? Or is it dependant on the amount (or efficiency of utilization) of RAM on the graphics card? nerd: I went in and checked that. It was set for quality as opposed to performance, at extreme right of scale. It occurred to me: there are a bunch of profiles in the avdvanced setup for the card. For various games etc. Maybe Poser6 should have a profile too? :] Fish

looks at the picture "Yo, she-bitch. Let's go." "I'LL SWALLOW YOUR SOULLLL...." "Come get some." KA-POW ka-cha KA-POW ka-cha ploff "Hail to the king, Baby. Good, bad... I'm the guy with the gun." Sorry, couldn't help it :D