I am working on a model - a pair of pants to be exact - and I'm having an odd problem, it took a while to realise the nature of it.  There is a poly in the thigh of the pants which Poser seems to think is grouped in the hip rather than the thigh.  Now both in Wings [which is the program I'm doing my mesh in] and UVMapper the triangle shows as being a part of the thigh yet Poser insists that it is a part of the hip.  Has anyone else ever run into this and if so, is there something I can do to fix it?  If I must I'll go in and change the mesh, but I'd rather understand the problem.  Here is a picture of the thigh showing the poly in question and a second of the hip and thigh [with the thigh changed to green so you can see the separate objects.  Any thoughts would be appreciated.

You can fix with the grouping tool in poser. Geep has a very good tutorial on how to use the grouping tool.

Bear in mind with bending turned on you bend both the the parent and the child parts.  Try turning it off, it might tell you something.

I's day you don't have nearly enough polygons in your mesh, incidently, and I can see at least one 5-sided polygon, which isn't going to fly either.

 

Firemonkey,

In regards to the mesh you posted, is that the rough mesh, or is it the subdivided mesh?  In any case, you might want to simplify the poly flow, getting rid of the n-gons.  So far, the pants look good; I can't wait to see the final product. -Starkdog

beryld: Thanks, I'll take a look into it, but it still puzzels me why Poser would read the objects wrong to create this problem in the first place.

Jim Burton: So you're suggesting turning of bending for testing purposes?  That might have caught this sooner - thanks for the idea.  As for the poly count, I know that these days people tend to go for very high poly counts and certainly that has advantages, but it also has down sides such as much slower rendering [which if you're doing animation is a very big issue] so I'm working mostly in the range that models which came with Poser Artist  used, which seems to be about  15-20% of the poly count typically used these days.  I figure the old poly counts worked fine before so there is no reason why they would stop working now [grin]  As for n-gons, yes, there are a fair number of them, but again, you'll find in a lot of them in any of the models that come with Poser Artist - which is mostly why you'll find them in my work since I learned how to make models for Poser by studying the models that came with it.  I have looked at more recent models and I plan on trying higher poly counts and avoiding n-gons in future models to see if it works better, but it's a bit late to start redesigning the set I'm working on so that will have to wait for the next  models I make.  For now I just want to get that one poly to behave and maybe adjust a few other minor things [heh]

Starkdog: Nope, not a rough mesh, just an older style as I explained Jim.  That's what happens when you just have Poser Artist and the stuff that comes with it [hehe] I have looked at a few other things in the last while, but up until then I had never seen meshes other than the stock Poser 4 and earlier which came with Poser Artist and so my work reflects that.  Since you're interested, I've included a picture of the mesh from from and back and the rendered pants below and I figured a closer view of the waist was worth while.  Other than a couple minor problems [mostly caused by that one triangular poly] the pants are complete - I'm just fixing a couple small problems with the way it moves when bending and twisting and such [heh]

Just wanted to thank everyone again - I've got the problem solved [even if I still don't quite understand why/how it happened] but your advice has been helpful.  Now I just need to tweak the matzones a tiny bit to solve a little bulging problem - but all the problem that caused me to post has been fixed.  Oh, and Dr Geep's stuff has been very informative [as always]  With luck [and a bit more work] the models I've been working on should soon be finished - basically I been fixing little joint and poke thru issues on a set of models for the last few weeks but it's looking like most of them are solved.  So again, thanks.

Hi FireMonkey,

Now that I can see the whole picture, I like your pants model.  Definently an interesting poly flow, especially around the knees and butt.  Have you set the pants up as a conforming figure?  I was curious as to how they bend and move.  BTW, great job using Wings.  I get lost in there, but yet I find Hexagon and Silo easy to use- go figure.  -Starkdog

For the most part they bend and move well, just a couple minor problems left - a little poke thru on the inner thigh when you move the thigh side to side and a bit of bunching at the belt when you bend the thigh a lot - the poke thru just needs a minor adjustment of a couple polys I think and the other may need a bit of an adjustment of the mat zones with the joint editor [always lots of fun - heh] I can tell you though, it's been quite a learning experience working on it.  I have two figure [1 male, 1 female] and pants, shirts and shoes for them - the shoes were easy enough, the shirts gave me a few problems when moving but not too much and then there were the pants - these are my first clothing models [before them I had a number of props I had done and a lot of MTs for modifying faces and such as well as a couple non-human figures]  I finished the set some weeks back and then got a few people to test them for me and it's been quite an experience fixing all the little problems.  The cloths conform to my figures [this pair of pants being for the guy] and they should work fine with the P4 default figures as well - past that I'm not sure as I don't have any figures that didn't come with Poser Artist or where made by me.

It is interesting what works and doesn't work for people - Wings3D is the only mesh program I've been able to get anything to work right with, but then, for 2D art I use Photoshop 4 - not 5 or 6 or 7 because I find them almost impossible to work with, but version 4 seems to click with my mind.  Now I wouldn't mind a virtual art program with 3D goggles and gloves as input so I could model stuff like working with clay, but I suspect that's a few years off - at least at a price I might think about [grin]

For some reason the female pants were much harder to get working right when I conformed them - they kept exploding at the seams, but then, I did that model before I did the male pants so I guess I must have learned something while making it ... either that or I got luckier with the male pants.  It took weeks to fix all the little issues with the female pants whereas these pants were mostly working ok before I started fixing things - other than the 1 poly that caused me to post this thread because it was stumping me, the main problem was poke thru at certain angles but none of these exploding seams [heh]

Once I have the pants completely fixed then I just have to do a bit of work on a MT to allow the shirts to "tuck into" the pants a bit more naturally so that the shirts will work with my pants or with other pants.

"solve a little bulging problem "

 

These are "Male" pants correct?

 

Uncheck genitals perhaps?

 

8 )

 

Joking

 

Nice Pants

 

Tom

Grin - well Tom, that's a possibility except the bulge would be in the wrong place - otherwise I could just pretend it was intended [hehehe]  Thanks for the "nice pants" comment - I have to admit it is nice to hear people like what I do.

Heh Heh.

Reminds me of the guy who is having no luck attracting girls on the beach.

 

His friends recommends that he put a sock in his Speedo...so he does.

 

A few hours later the friend asks if the sock is helping but the poor guy says he still is having no luck.

 

The friend looks down and says "In the front....you need to put it in the front"

 

8 ). 

Yep, it's all in the where of the bulge [hehehe]

poser can handle 5-sided polygons no problem...
however, terminating a line in the middle of another poly is going to cause some smoothing problems. much better to get rid of them by extending it to a corner and creating a tri/quad.

even budget computers these days are pretty fast, and 99% of these products are being used for still renders. an extra poly here and there wont hurt anyone -- ive actually seen pants models in the store that are over 100k polys and AFAIK noone complained about them, lol.

This is a good point, though for me, animation is the important thing [heh] so I do tend to think of the animators out there - after all, a model that renders well for animation [speed wise that is] is not a disadvantage to those doing stills ... but the smoothing issue is a good point, to me, the idea model is one which renders super fast and looks perfectly real [or whatever it is supposed to look like - after all, if you want an anime feel then things that look real aren't what you're wanting - grin] Obviously there is a comprimise that must be struck between quality of appearence and speed of rendering so my own desire tends to be an attempt to find as good a balance between the two as possible.  Of course, having an older computer [800Mhz CPU] and working almost exclusively on animation related stuff, render time is something I really notice - maybe if I had a 3Ghz cpu I'd worry less [grin]

I think I'll take a look at the 5+ sided polys in my mesh and see if any of them might be causing smoothing problems.  Most often I don't have vertics in the middle of an edge but that doesn't mean it never happens [heh]  One thing I do know though, more polys don't always produce better renders and it seems that sometimes people add many polys for little or no benefit, I think there are levels - that is, let's say 1000 polys looks sort of ok for a specific mesh - you might not even see a difference if you up it to 1200 but perhaps at 3000 it becomes clearly better but then it might not be noticably better again until you hit 10000 - much like frame rates, noticable improvements come in jumps rather than a continuous scale.  A very great deal of it comes down to the smoothing routeens, which is why your point about 5-sided polys is so significant.  Work with the software and you get better results - funny how that works - grin.

you also have to keep in mind that in still renders, people want more detail.
this is especially important in portrait type renders, where photorealistic textures have usually far surpassed clothing... so you have a big render of a model wearing pants and a shirt, and the model looks photoreal but the clothing doesnt quite keep up - it ends up looking strange.

in this case it would almost be better to stay with the true roots of 3D and release slicker, more stylized textures (such as the ones in final fantasy - advent children) as upposed to the supersharpened detail/blemish laden ultra-super-mega-photorealistic textures. but people always go for those, so i guess its the clothing that needs to keep up :(

poser also deals very poorly with bump and displacement maps (i suspect this is because, in order to speed up rendering, poser uses an incredibly small scale. due to this microscopic scale, i believe the renderer discards much shadow, bump, displacement, etc detail as 'insignificant' and therefore renders them inaccurately. my theory can be proven if you scale a poser character up to 1000%, scale it down to fit in the camera view, then render it. even though the final rendered character will be the same size as the unscaled one in the final render, all bump/displacement detail will be crystal clear and the render will take 20x as long to complete. in a true, accurate renderer you could scale something to 50,000 times the original size and render it, it would take the identical amount of time to render since it is rendering exactly the same detail and topology. i believe that originally CL chose the microscopic, nonstandard scale for poser because it sped up rendering - and a fast renderer is one of poser's selling points).

so, because poser displacement/bump mapping is very poor, id rather model in some details than try to texture them in and compromise with a blurry or jagged end result. for example, if a pair of pants i model is 8000 polys, and for another 5000 polys i can have all of the seams raised, the fly modeled, buttons and belt loops modeled, cuff detail, more wrinkles, etc -- then i will go for that instead in a heartbeat. not only does it save me time in UV and texture mapping later on, but the end result will also be much sharper and clearer and will shadow properly.
not to mention that in the end it is probably more efficient (in poser anyway) to load a 13k poly pair of shorts than to load an 8k poly one with 2000x2000 bump, displacement, transparency, etc maps.

i am so glad i switched to sub-D modeling from NURBS. NURBS is good for some things, but no matter how good you are with exporting to meshes, the final mesh ends up very inefficient and wasteful. i can put a lot more detail into my meshes now with sub-D, since every single polygon in them is there because i put it there.

as another alternative (and i havent seen anyone do this yet - it seems like a very viable and marketable idea to me) you could do TWO versions of your clothing. there are reduced res vicky and mike figures that need clothing too. you could take your original lower poly mesh, export it and run it through your conforming utility... and you could then take that same mesh, subdivide it and perhaps add in a few details, and do the same... selling either both the lowres and highres clothing in one bundle, or putting them up in your store as two separate alternatives -- so the animators (and people still running pentium MMXs with 128mb of RAM) could buy the lowres and the still renderers could buy the highres.

cheers,
-gabriel

I rather like the idea of having both low and high count versions of a model.  If bump maps worked well then it would be less important but as you say, bump maps don't work nearly as well in Poser as one might like.  Now some of the shadow issues you speak of can be fixed by using better lights - the stadard Poser lights have shadow maps set at 256 [I'm speaking Poser Artist since that is all I have - don't know if later versions use the same standard or not] but if you use a larger value such as 1024, you get a much nicer job of shadows.  Ultimately though, it seems there are several philosophical splits within the Poser community, which perhaps is a good reason to support multiple versions of models, to provide for the different wants and needs.

Mind you, I don't think I'll ever get into making clothing as a primary thing, making them conform is very tricky business - I'm more into figures but if you have figures, they need cloths [well, not everyone would agree there - grin] and so I have to tackle clothing as well.  At least that way the cloths are more likely to match the figures [heh] but hopefully other people will take an interest in making cloths for figures I create [which requires that I impress people with my figures so that's where I plan to focus most of my energies]   Anyway, I think it makes a nicer collection if figures come with a set of cloths and a handful of props.

Quote - Anyway, I think it makes a nicer collection if figures come with a set of cloths and a handful of props.

exactly why i took up modeling :)

In my case I started for my own animation work - I had limited resources and besides, nobody was making the figures I wanted [heh] then too, so much of the time the stuff you can get assumes Poser 5 and above, Poser Artist [which is what I have] doesn't even support python scripts so stuff like wordrobe  wizard and many other neat things won't work with it so I have to do it all the old fashion way - which works just as well, but no where near as quickly [grin]

At first I was just making props and MTs for the P4 figures but I decided I really needed to go beyond that, which is why I'm doing figures now.  It also means that I'm not doing the figures that already exist - like the 5 billionth new "realistic woman" - my area is in fantasy creatures and people or else SF, those being the things I prefer to do animations with.

Although I have to say, modeling is addictive - I'm constantly thinking of new things I want to do - which is a bit of a pain when I'm busy trying to perfect the old stuff [heh] but in time I hope to have quite a few interesting projects completed.  I'm just hoping right now I can get these pants working 100% [I was comparing to some of the P4 clothing in hopes of finding out how they solved some of the problems and I discovered that my pants seem to have fewer problems than some of the P4 pants - but they still aren't good enough to keep me happy ... you know how it is]

I bought Poser to do animation and at that time I didn't expect to do any models of anything - except my stories kept needing things I didn't have and now I think I enjoy the model work as much as the animation [grin]