When Poser 6 will not render a complex scene, I tend to export it as a wavefront obj, pass it through PoseRay and render it in POV-Ray. Unfortunately, I often get jagged shadows (see green circles), banded chest shadows (see blue circles) and odd leg texture shading (see red circles).

Does anyone know what is going wrong and, more importantly, how to fix it? The post-work to fix all these little glitches takes quite a while and I'd love to know what the problem is.

I tried radiosity on the scene and it made a real mess with horrible dirty/noisy banded shading.

Scene was rendered at best quality (without radiosity) and antialiasing on. I had one parallel light - for the sunlight shadow, and a large area light with area light density of 9 and no shadows. I have seen this behaviour in quite a few renders from POV-Ray but I can't remember seeing it in Poser 5 or 6.

Thanks for any info you can offer.

I don't know for sure, never having taken that route, butit seems fairly obvious that the glitches you are getting are from where the various body groups join up. Poser gets over this by using smoothing, which tends to blur these details out. Smoothing in Poser can be a pain for objects with sharp edges, but a boon for organic stuff. HOW you get over that when exporting, I have no idea. Just trying to isolate where the problem lies... Cheers, Diolma

You might want to enable the weld option when exporting from Poser.

Make sure that the seams are welded when exporting to Poser 6. If that does not work then in PoseRay go to the geometry tab and click on "weld vertices". Increase the smoothing threshold to about 65 if you have any objects with sharp corners (or make it 180 for organic shapes) and click on update. That should fix this problem. Let me know if that does not work.

FlyerX

Hi All,
I tried using the weld option on a single figure and it fixed the limb texture join issue and the jagged shadow on the chest.
The shadow between breasts is still a little dark and angular but I guess (based on your replies) that it is due to the large crease angle between breast and chest.
Thanks for all the help.

FlyerX,
PoseRay is a great tool. Thanks for all the effort you have put into it and the technical support.

Regards,
Jovial.