Everyone knows I have low bandwidth so I can not troll the internet for answers; sorry about that!

Edges. Any idea how to make them sharp and crisp in Poser while using the Smooth Polygons option in Renderfly?

Smooth Polygons turns a lot of cube props into ripped or crumpled meshes. Smooth Polygons makes an offending prop quite distorted.

Before you answer, please note I already know WHY this issue exists. I only need some pointers on how to avoid it. With that said, I noticed that some props made by Smith Micro/e-Frontier used very fine beveled edges on cubes to avoid this issue. Even further, some props are actually just planes sitting nicely together - no edges means no distortion; note that some of the Primitives props in your Poser library are planes that aren't actually welded end-to-end; see one of the cubes for an example.

The followup question of 'does using tris stop a mesh from distorting when using Smooth Polys?' is already answered in my own experiments: nope! :D  Poser doesn't seem to care if quads or tris are used for a prop; it'll handle those hard edges based soley on the vertices at the edges. shrug

It'd be nice if we could use low-poly models with normal maps:( That Smooth Polygons option is just so demanding of how a mesh is made!

Attached Link: This page was excerpt from THIS TUTORIAL ... ;=]

For objects that are not going to be smoothed, hard egdes save the most polygons. But if you smooth the object, the hard edges will split.

Bevelling creates more polygons, but the edges will stay sharp even if the object is smoothed.

Render shows three times the same object rendered with polygon smoothing on:

1. Soft edges

2. Hard edges

3 Bevelled edges

Where is the setting for "Bevelled edges"?

There is no setting in Poser for bevelled edges. You have to modify the object in a modeller.

Same for hard edges.

All you can do in Poser is to modify the crease angle or exempt an object or figure completely from being polygon smoothed.

Hmm, you could theoretically use the grouping tool to split an object into smaller parts, thus creating split (hard) edges, but it's very, very tedious compared to working in a modeller.

Also smoothing groups create boundaries, across which no smoothing happens.

As stated above, bevelled edges are done in a modelling app.

Also - a matter of personal preference - the vertices can be split before loading into Poser, which helps make surfaces appear smooth, edges hard and makes for an overall clean looking mesh.

I always split verts on my models because I find they look dirty and half melted otherwise.  It also works on meshes created for other apps, when the obj is loaded to Poser as a prop.  You can split verts in the free version of UVMapper.  Naturally, the Pro version does it, too.  

I use very fine "bevels". What that really is is another edge loop slid up close to the corner edge. I prefer this way because very few edges in nature/real world look perfectly sharp ;). This is only my personal preference tho...lol. Spliting edges does keep the poly counts down tho and if you are worried about that, you should just split the edges :).

Laurie

Voting for LaurieA's solution. This is excellent for seam-creases.

I've had issues with smoothing with things like rigging - just made items I needed to have no smoothing as completely separate objects to items I wanted smoothing.

You can control the smoothing further down to group level.
Set smoothing On or OFF for each group.
it is not limited to object level.

Want sharp edges?
Set Smoothing for that group OFF in its parameters dial.

Max crease angle for smoothing is 180°.

Smoothing is very good explained in the manual also.

I guess I should mention that Wings3D will allow you to selectively "split" edges by making them hard rather than soft.

Laurie

Quote - I guess I should mention that Wings3D will allow you to selectively "split" edges by making them hard rather than soft.

Laurie

Attractive women can do that to a guy, also. :lol:
(sorry, couldn't resist)

Thank you to everyone that replied to this!
Thanks to knowledge I got here I can actually keep the edges of some buildings from exploding when I render them in scene with soft bodies like V4 and Alyson using Smooth Polygons!

What a relief!  The simplest option is, as stated, to use smoothing groups. I'd done this in the past and it worked great but I'd completely forgotten about it and wouldn't have thought to apply to it a building.

My brain is ...off when I work on 3D at 3AM:P