Hi Morkonan

Quote - - Yes, the laces that are shown in the above pics are of the older model.  Also, no displacement or maps have been applied to them in these renders except for a slight color change so they stand out a little more from the eyelets and the fabric of the jumper.  In the final version , they'll probably have a procedural bump map applied to them along with a procedural texture.  However, if I can get them to yield a very good UV map, I might try applying a texture.

Uiih, I think this was a misunderstanding. What I was talking about was not the laces at your work but the laces or clamps I had seen at the legsides on the TV images.

Quote - - Thank you very much for that detailed explanation!  I'm going to try that last suggestion and see what results I can come up with.  The real problem will be getting the map correct.  I can't simply overlay it over V4's map as the mesh is signficantly different so the UVs don't match up.  But, I've got a couple of different ways I can try to use in order to manipulate the UVs to force a matchup.  That might take a bit of time though even though it would be more precise. 

I agree partly. What I was meaning is to project the contours of your suite on the original V4 uvmap right in place and use that to stop the displacing under the suit that making the poke through's. Sure you can't use the suit's uvmap directly. For the purpose it has to be matched onto the V4 uvmap.

Quote - - LOL!  I didn't split out any vertices in the laces, as I understand the term.  However, the laces, the piping (rolled edge) of the suit and all the other components all have their own vertices/edges that are not shared with their neighboring objects.  So, they stand out from the mesh fairly well.  Poser, according to DAZ, has problems rendering split vertices, that may be something you've run into.  Also, booleans cause no end of pain in many packages and I wouldn't be surprised at weird results in meshes containing boolean operations.  Did you use a boolean operation to cut the torpedo tubes in the submarine?  If so, that may be the issue.

Yes, what you did is what I meant. Pipe and belt and so on are not connected, not shareing the same vertices. B.t.w. Poser seems not to have problems with split vertices, only if the parameter "weld vertices" on loading a geometry is check it could get problems. Cause than split vertices will be melted and than Poser tries to smooth all the connected polygons. That's the background of that problem. Poser is more optimized to render organic structures like animals or peoples than technical structures like buildings or vehicles with sharp edges.

If you have a simple beam made from a cube, so 4 sides plus 2 ends, and use polygon smoothing you end up rendering with a more or less blobby thing but never a beam.
But there is also a trick for such thingies ... beveling or inner extrusions with only some very small difference keeps Poser from bulging what should be plain.
So the idea to have a small bevel or a little engraved pipe around the "case" might not only look good but also stay's the case to be a case.

Using boolean procedures in C4D is not the problem cause the are all changed to object mesh again. Otherwise they will not been usable for poser. And also I optimized the resulting triangles a lot by hand but the problem was that the share all their vertices at the corners.
And the smooth angles from C4D are not equal to that angles as poser is looking on. So what is looking clean in C4D isn't neccessarily in Poser. It's more a problem of different render engine or their interpretation of parameters than of the mesh as such. But makes some fore and back activities to get things sorted out.