When you turn on polygon smoothing in Poser5 firefly creates barrels in some meshes where there is no barrel. A simple cube with 6 sides and 8 vertices can be turned into a beautiful barrel! I don't know if this bug happens with Poser6 too, it's a bug of Poser5 or an inherent bug of firefly. Who made firefly?, in what is based?

"A simple cube with 6 sides and 8 vertices can be turned into a beautiful barrel!" likewise a simple cylinder can become a strange hourglass shape gotta split those verts ;) P6 has a 'creasing' feature that adjusts the level of smoothing.& for once smoothing is actually worthwhile in that we can control it

Smoothing has to change only the illumination and never deform the model!

Smoothing was intended to deform the model !! The intention was to smooth out an organic model where a limited number of polygons was used. Granted in Poser 5 it overdid this as it applied to all models even when apparent sharp edges were used, this has been improved in Poser 6. In general turn off smoothing when rendering unless you are rendering a closeup of an organic model (for non-organic models it will cause problems and form any distance the smoting won't be noticed anyway).

This kind of smoothing(deformation) kills low poly models!

I usually control the level of smoothing by splitting the verts by material at different angles in uv mapper...for anything non-organic I almost always uncheck smoothing in P5.unless it's for columns,pipes or cables or other props where smoothing is actually an advantage. Poser's smoothing is quite effective at certain things..namely smoothing the hell out of something...so it's good to see an option to control it in P6 Cheers stefan

Every individual body part or prop can have polygon smoothing turned on or off, so you can turn it on for the whole scene and turn it off for those props you don't want to be subjected to polygon smoothing. Micro-polygon smoothing is one of the coolest features of Poser 5. It means you can get very smooth organinc meshes without having the masses upon masses of polygons you find in the DAZ generation 3 figures.

Attached Link: http://www.renderosity.com/messages.ez?ForumID=12356&Form.ShowMessage=1505730

Smooth polygons is useful sometimes. Little Dragon explained it to me, way back when. With diagrams and everything. (See link.)

It is the biggest pain with using P4/PP models in P5, though. A lot of times, they will blow up. It's not hard to turn off smooth polygons for a simple prop, but if it's something like a house, with zillions of parts, it's a pain to fix. Unless you just turn off smooth polygons in Render Options.

Is it to make props so that they come into Poser with smooth polygons turned off?

agree with ajax, smoothing judiciously used on normal-poly model instead of smoothing off on billion-poly model. smart vs dumb ::::: Opera :::::

" What? You don't appreciate Poser's marshmallow-creation plugin? ;-)"
The other day I rendered one of my products in Poser5 and was shocked, the product become a surreal product!, something like when look at an image and ask yourself, am I sick?, am I drunk?
There is a way to put some line in the product to disable the smoothing even in the case when the smoothing option in firefly is checked on?

Message edited on: 04/14/2005 13:18

'It's not hard to turn off smooth polygons for a simple prop, but if it's something like a house, with zillions of parts, it's a pain to fix. Unless you just turn off smooth polygons in Render Options' Or unless the creator saves the models out of P5 with 'smooth polys' switched off for those parts. Oh, hey! I do that! Been doing it for a long time now. Nope, it's not hard to do. You don't even need to buy poser 5 to do it. Inserting 1 line in the code switches it off too. I make a point of saving everthing out of P5 so I can get all the shader info right, (then I change the version # to 4.01), but you can do it by hacking the files. Pity more people don't do it. mac

"There is a way to put some line in the product to disable the smoothing even in the case when the smoothing option in firefly is checked on?"

Should be possible... Just had a look at a prop created and saved in Poser 5...

At the end of the prop you'll find...

}
locked 0
backfaceCull 0
visibleInReflections 1
visibleInRender 1
displacementBounds 0
shadingRate 0
smoothPolys 0
}
doc
{
addActor BackDrop
}
}

It should not be a problem adding those lines to a P4 prop.
P4 will just ignore them, P5/P6 will interpret them.

'There is a way to put some line in the product to disable the smoothing even in the case when the smoothing option in firefly is checked on?' Sorry, kawecki. I just saw that. I mentioned it in the post above, but here's the hack in detail. This is what a P5 file looks like - at the end of the body part, after the channels. --------------------------------------------- endPoint -0.171 0.401 0.098 origin 0 0 -0.087 orientation 0 0 0 displayOrigin 0 displayMode USEPARENT customMaterial 0 locked 0 backfaceCull 0 visibleInReflections 1 visibleInRender 1 displacementBounds 0 shadingRate 0.2 smoothPolys 0 } -------------------------------- Add the line smoothPolys 0 before the closing brace. You don't need the displacement or shading lines, just the smooth polys one. This is if you don't have P5. If you do have it, switch 'smooth ploys' off in properties and save the file, then change the version to 4.01 for P4/PP users. mac

Oops! Cross-posted with you, 24/7. Yep, P4 just ignores anything it doesn't understand. mac

Thanks, great info. The best of both worlds - lower-poly models that don't blow up like marshmallows in the microwave.

Thanks, I shall put "smoothPolys 0" in all my new products, I create them in Poser4 to be used in any Poser.

you guys are definately dangerous, thanks for posting the hacks!

FYI, this hack also turns smooth polys off in P6. The P6 files are very similar with just a couple of minor additions for Zbuffering and CreaseAngle. mac

I'll suggest that the fix for Poser6 also change the name of the option
"polygon smoothing"
to
"am I drunk?"
or "grass is beautiful"

Message edited on: 04/14/2005 19:32

Polygon smoothing IS beautiful for those of us who wish to animate LowRes Jessie but have her look as toned and subtly shaped as her OverResEd big sister. ::::: Opera :::::

Hehe, I had a staff handle turn into the Good Year Blimp the other day. Unchecking "smooth polygons" for the object fixed it.

and has "character". Actually I kind of like the look of it depending on what setting it's placed in.