Hi everyone,
I'm hoping someone can tell me why this happens when I render a piece I'm working on. The unrendered hammer I made looks fine. But when I render it, it shows up all fat and out of shape. Have a look at the pic below for before on the left, and after on the right. Does anyone know why this is?
I created the hammer in Wings 3D, and saved it as a .OBJ file. Once I imported the hammer into Poser, I applied a texture I made and this is how it turned out. So, I tried something else; I turned it into a Poser prop, then deleted the .OBJ. I re-textured the hammer, and got the same result. Does anyone know how I can get it to keep from doing this?

Thanks -

what version of poser are you using?
if you are using 6 or 7 adjust your crease angle on the hammer.
for 5 and below, you'll need to split your vertices (use the free UVmapper to do that) or model in small bevels (like .01) for each edge to stop the smoothing.

I'm using Poser 6. When you talk about increasing the crease angle.... is that something I need to do in Poser? Or are you talking about re-opening it in Wings and doing it in there? In either case, I'm not sure what you mean exactly...

select the hammer, you'll have the pararamters menu with the dials. there also is the Properties Tab. you'll find crease angle there. also there's a selection for Smoothing on the object there. I'd turn that off.

Whoa - adjusting the crease angle just made it worse, but, I unchecked the "smooth polygons" box and that fixed it right up. Shows how much I need to learn about Poser. Thanks!

What you are seeing is the effect of poser smoothing. If the ends of a cylinder are not visible you can simply delete the polygon , otherwise unweld it . The square part of the hammer can be improved by small bevels along the edges, or unwelding . 

Changing the crease angle should fix the problem in poser 7 , but you will need to play with the settings , try 30, 45, 60, 80, 120, 160 degrees and see what happens to that mesh .  Turn smoothing off is an option too. In some cases you want smoothing on but parts of the model need sharp edges, That is a matter of small bevels and selected unwelds .

Splitting vertices is an unwweld but unwelds everything so may be overkill. Learn to be selective.

Nice BIG hammer by the way .

the main issue with unwelding / spitting vertices is you then can't use Displacement Mapping properly on the mesh, it does not calculate properly across the splits.