I don't see any other way to explain this. Bear in mind I don't use Poser 6 all that much, so I'd normally be the last to notice, but why hasn't anybody else noticed this? One of my beta testers brought this to my attention, after finding I couldn't duplicate the problem in Poser 4, I looked into it in Poser 6. Poser 6 doesn't seem to weld straps (and I assume similar items) the are split into two body groups. Here is a pic that shows what I'm talking about, one rendered in Poser 5, one in 6. Firefly or Poser 4 render, or just Preview, Poser 6 has this problem. Has any body else noticed this?

Here is a shot of Jessi's Bra from Poser 6, with the textures removed to show the problem. You can go in and see this one for youself. It is the pink Bra in props, Jessi clothing. It isn't just me. ;-)

This can also happen if you have a four sided polygon where one of the interior angles is greater than 180 degrees. Can also happen if one of the interior angles is equal to 180 degrees. This is what sometimes happens when you untriangulate a model, and your untriangulator (is there such a word, lol) does not evaluate the angles before removing triangles.

Message edited on: 06/15/2005 22:23

According to Cinema 4D.There is such a word as untriangulate I would imagine the thing that "untriangulate's" would be an "untriangulator" 8 )~ Tom

Thanks guy! I tried exporting the swimsuit as triangles, instead of polygons, didn't seem to help, though, as you can see. Only way I can see to fix this would be to make the clothing as unimesh, with virtual groups, instead of detached groups, the way V3 is made. However, I don't have any good tools to work on clothing this way (bringing it into Max will automatically detach all the groups), so I don't see any way to do it. I think the only answer is for e-frontier to squash this major bug. Unless you have some other ideas? Hey Jeff01, could you please put in a smaller pic? People have to scroll side-side to read the text now. ;-)

P5 can be a work-around here, and perhaps provide a clue to the problem. In P6, I untextured the object and saved to the figure library. For some reason I wasn't able to save to the Jessi Clothing library. I copied the saved files to the P5 runtime. I loaded the object in P5. It complained about the newer version but loaded anyway. I exported the object as an obj file, checking "Include body part names...", "Include figure names...", and "As Morph Target...". I made a subfolder of the Jessi Clothing folder and put a copy of the original ppz file there. I uncompressed the ppz file with the python utility. I edited the pp2 to point to the object that I exported from P5. I loaded the new clothing object and the artifacts are gone. The top picture is the P6 smooth lined mode preview of the new object. The bottom left is a P6 render of the original object, and the bottom right is a P6 render of the new object. This is a new picture, only 600 pixels wide ;-)

Message edited on: 06/16/2005 09:58

Thanks Jeff!

I never split my body groups. In Lightwave you can export the body group objs without doing this. And with Greenbriar all the morphs are exported in one shot. This is one of the major annoyances of Poser from one version to the next you can't trust things will look the same.

Jim, I may be late here but did you try turning off P6 smoothing for those areas? I don't know if that would have any effect at all in P4 Renderer though.

Yeah, I tried that, didn't make any difference. I don't know if you can work unimesh with Max 7 (as it does OBJ native, I've heard), but you can't really using the Habaware plug-ins. I'll go over this problem with CLsteve when he gets back, I think.

I think the problem is caused by a new feature of P6--Smoothing Groups.

The P6 manual discusses these. They're not required, but if they exist P6 respects them.

The geometry of the Jessi Pink Bra has embedded smoothing groups. If I create a prop at the offending areas and export as an obj, the obj keeps the smoothing groups. P5 seems to ignore them and renders without artifacts. If I then export from P5 as an obj, there are no smoothing groups. So, re-importing the P5-created obj into P6 renders OK because there are no smoothing groups.

Also, after editing out the smoothing groups from an obj exported from P6 leaving everything else the same, P6 renders without artifacts. The smoothing groups of the pink bra cause artifacts at the odd triangulated facets, AND at the interface between body parts. I don't think (but I really don't know enough) that smoothing groups can span body parts.

We need to learn more about the proper application of smoothing groups.

I don't think it has anything to do with smoothing groups. I imported the Poser 6 bra into and re-exported it, without export smoothing groups set in Habaware, with exactly the same result, as you can see. I also had it set to export as triangles, that didn't make any difference, either. I also ran my own swimsuit, which never had smoothing set anyway, through Poser 5 with no change in the results. I think the problem is very simple, there is a bug in Poser 6 that should have been fixed, but went unnoticed. It doesn't weld polygons if they are in parts that aren't continous with the main split.

Jim, you're right.

While removing the smoothing groups did remove the P6 rendering artifacts at the triangulated facet, it did not help at the interface between body parts. These would appear to be two different problems. I focused on the triangulated facet and was wrong to assume the fix would apply to both.

I'm not sure that any program should automatically, physically weld body part seams. That changes the geometry and would screw up morph targets. I don't think P5 does this. I do think that P5 is more forgiving than P6, applying some sort of smoothing that I can't turn off. Perhaps P6 has to do things differently, more strictly, to allow the new crease angle feature, or perhaps it is a bug.

Jeff

Oh, all versions of Poser do the welding, there is a command in the CR2 that tells Poser to do it, if you leave it out (I've done that!) you get exactly this result, the welding isn't automatic. In fact, when I saw the problem that is the first thing I checked. ;-) Here is what it looks like in the CR2 of my swimsuit: weld abdomen:2 hip:2 weld chest:2 abdomen:2 weld rThigh:2 hip:2 weld lThigh:2 hip:2 I did some rendering in Poser 6 today and noticed some other bugs too, like the metal "gold" shaders aren't working right, I also noticed the area render was coming out black if you used ray-tracing, but that was before I put in SR1, I didn't check it after. The more I look the more bugs I find.

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