Well can I cheat and show the quick and dirty box to almost-a-sphere, for the time being?

I imported a welded 6-polygon box. I enabled smoothing, and set the crease angle to 95 degrees, so all the edges would be smooth. I duplicated it and rotated the second one so a corner is facing us.

It's not exactly a sphere, but it demonstrates micropolygon displacement.

If I were to carefully craft a displacement map (would not be easy - lots of math) I could force it to be a perfect sphere. I don't have time right now to do that.

Smoothing in Poser is basically the same as displacement, except not driven by a map image, but by analyzing the geometry itself.

The flaw is revealed by the ray-traced shadows. Ray tracing is a bag on the side of the REYES renderer, and for ray-traced shadows (or reflection or refraction) the displacement is not implemented except on the vertices. Thus, the true geometry (boxes) are revealed by the shadows. With a higher poly model, this problem is not so obvious. With depth-mapped shadows, this problem doesn't exist - the shadows are round.

---

Renderosity forum reply notifications are wonky. If I read a follow-up in a thread, but I don't myself reply, then notifications no longer happen AT ALL on that thread. So if I seem to be ignoring a question, that's why. (Updated September 23, 2019)