How do you know what to set the crease angle at?

Is there drawback to making it too small or too big?

 

Vilters wrote:

For my Low Poly figures-models I set it at 180 in General preferences.

For any other object or group, I adapt its settings in their Properties Palette if needed.
The Poser Manuals have a good explanation of what Smooth Polygons does. 

HARD edges like the sides of a cube or a beam or a box have to be hard, so no smoothing.
Long tubes Low Res = no smoothing.
Table - chair = no smoothing.
A pillow = smoothing (depending on the obj fle.)

It takes some try, and area renders, to find the right settings for your objects.

 

In general, anything with soft edges ON
Anything that HAS to stay sharp OFF

Ha-ha-, a knife or a sword would have to stay sharp, so no smoothing.

 

If you dig deeper, it becomes a combination.
Texture is around Poly's, can be smoothed..
Texture + bump map  = experiment. What does the bump map do??
Texture + bump map + displacement map, and it takes some testing to get the final result right. All depends on the maps you want to add.

 

Example:

 

Take the cat from your avatar.
Render smooth polygons.
Now add a bump map. Render with smoothed
Now add a spot node in displacement map to get some furr on her skin.
Will take some testing to get right.

My only comments are that at least in P7 (haven't tried later) it can show you black lines where the mesh of the object is and the object to be smoothed needs to be designed for poser in mind (forget how that's done) to keep weird things from happening.

 So I leave it off unless I need it.

I have found (for props) that a smoothing crease angle of 35 will result in hard edges and smooth lines...the best of both worlds!

Not sure if it will work for everything but that's how I set up my products!

I leave everything at default smoothing angle (80 degrees) and model accordingly.  If I need something to appear sharp, I add edges where it needs to be sharp.  While you can certainly adjust smooth angle and model more simply, I can usually tell when this is done when looking at a render and it always bothers me when I notice it.

What does this "smooth polygons" option do exactly? Is there any other program than poser that supports smoothing like this?

Poser's polygon smoothing is a feature of Reyes rendering.  A list of apps that work the same is in the link.  The way a lot of other mainstream CG apps do smoothing is Catmull-Clark Subdivision.

Attached Link: Direct Ray Tracing of Smoothed and Displacement Mapped Triangles

Thanks, for the record (and users of the forums search): poser's polygon smoothing looks a lot like this algorithm by Smits/Shirley/Stark (see link). At least it also interpolates the vertices (which means, unlike with Catmull/Clark only the polygons are smoothed, not the vertices). Reyes renderers however usually implement Catmull/Clark not this one (which is not surprising, given that Edwin Catmull (the one with the subdivision) also developed the Reyes algorithm at Pixar :-).