Snarley's original post:

I've been following the thread about Genesis in Poser, and the idea of implementing subdivision in Poser got my attention.

I've been playing a bit with it today, to see what can be done.

Here one of the hands has been subdivided. It makes quite a difference.

With some posing and some simple morphs ...

WOOT!!! I knew if it was anybody...gonna be you...lol.

Laurie

And with conformed clothes ...

Facial expressions ...

And UVs still intact. Yay!

eeeww. The old Bertha. lol. Nice work. Which version of sub D are you using? Doo Sabin, Catmul Clark or just a generic smoothing algorithm?

Catmul Clark, Teyon.

I have some issues with parented body parts at the moment - one character has lost her eyes!

Awesome work Snarly..

Maybe you could exclude body parts? That way one would only subdivide that which is needed..

Quote - Catmul Clark, Teyon.

I have some issues with parented body parts at the moment - one character has lost her eyes!

That's ok...she's got a spare. :D

Cage has done a lot of work with Python based subdivision in Poser. I guess he has to be the expert on the subject. You may like to contact him before finalising anything, because he may have a few useful tips.

it looks very good.  does it improve rendering the surface vs. poser smoothing?

thumbs up!

Very cool.. but does this break morphs?

Done right before render. With undo! :D

Oops....

Laurie

Isn't that much what poser smoothing already does though?

Quote - Isn't that much what poser smoothing already does though?

No, or Genesis would look a lot better in Poser than it does currently.

Laurie

I'm not goin there.. ;)

Nah, it was just a statement of fact ;). I was really hoping this would help the Genesis in Poser folks have a better experience ;). Poser's smoothing doesn't seem to smooth it as much as it needs to be. Subdivision is the answer for that :D.

Laurie

Even turning it up? Could be people are just using the default setting.

Yeah, even turning it up to 180 doesn't help completely because it's so low res. I think Catmul-Clark is what DS4 uses. Not sure tho. If it is, Snarly's script will be perfect :).

Laurie

Very cool, excellent work Snarly! Lot's of great things happening for Poser lately!

Laurie, yes, Catmul-Clark is what DAZ Studio uses.

Coldrake

SnarlyGribbly: Astounding!

I had sort of assumed that this would be more useful for new content, that explicitly exported the control mesh and has a facility to mark crease edges. For existing content smoothing seemed more appropriate. Your experiments look fine, but have you tried a high end figure? On your first picture the wrinkles on the thumb seemed to be smoothed out.

I have subdivided Sydney in Silo and reimported her and she looks fine. However I can't see any difference between subd and smoothing when rendered. What should I look for?

Snarlygribbly : I have no idea your education about modeling App's ,SubD meshes ect ect.
For all I know your the master at zBrush.
So forgive my igonrace.
I do get your trying to help. Thanks a lot.

If your going to make your mesh a SubD you half to model it a certain way.
If it's modeled wrong the eyes could do bad things.

A well modeled SubD mesh will be 100% quads .no triangles.
Charactor polycount around 20,000.
Most Poser meshes probably not the best meshes to test your SubD plug.
V3 was not made for SubD.
V4 was but her polycount is to high.

Genensis would be the best mesh to use for testing your SubD plug.

Good Luck

For got to say you need to lower Genesis Subdivion level to 0 before you export.
Polycount will be around 18,872.

The cr2 exporter always exports at base resolution level 0. At 19592 polygons.
That's the main reason why (some) morphs on genesis do not look good. Smoothing can't help here

If DAZ are doing what I think they are doing then you probably wont need this.

With the Plugin structure you now have in SR3 it wouldn't surprise me to find DAZ are making a "hook" type plugin, this will allow you to work with the DS engine directly in Poser, which is what they wanted all along. So no more jumping through hoops to get a CR2 to use in Poser, instead you'll just load the DUF file from your library and you'll have a CC SubD Genesis just like we do, you'll also have access to all of the other functions that make Genesis what it is in DS.

To me that's the logical and most common sense aproach, but the DAZ devs have shown in the past to be a bit lacking in both, so don't be too surprised if it's something completely different :lol:

Quote - it looks very good.  does it improve rendering the surface vs. poser smoothing?

I haven't tried it *instead8 od Poser's smoothing, only in addition to it.

There is a noticeable improvement, although not as much as I'd hoped for. Still, an improvement nevertheless.

Quote - For existing content smoothing seemed more appropriate. Your experiments look fine, but have you tried a high end figure?

I agree.

For my own renders I'll probably just stick to Poser's smoothing, which does an excellent job. This was just for fun really, to see if it could be done.

As for high end figures, I'm not sure what you mean. The benefit of this is to be seen on low poly figures, rather than high poly, if that's what you mean.

I've tried it on Aiko 3 and it works fine...

Quote - Snarlygribbly : I have no idea your education about modeling App's ,SubD meshes ect ect.

Zilch. Nada. I know nuffink :-)

Quote - For all I know your the master at zBrush.

I couldn't model a box!

Quote - Genensis would be the best mesh to use for testing your SubD plug.

Of course, but that's where my plan ran aground :-)
I don't have Genesis and don't fancy installing DS just for this.
I need a Genesis user to play with it!

Quote - > Quote - For existing content smoothing seemed more appropriate. Your experiments look fine, but have you tried a high end figure?

I agree.

For my own renders I'll probably just stick to Poser's smoothing, which does an excellent job. This was just for fun really, to see if it could be done.

As for high end figures, I'm not sure what you mean. The benefit of this is to be seen on low poly figures, rather than high poly, if that's what you mean.

I've tried it on Aiko 3 and it works fine...

Do you have a test script so I can see what it does to S5's knee?

Heh heh!

I made it into a little plugin using the new addon stuff in SR3 :-D

I don't have genesis but I have plenty of low res models  you're welcome to try it on.

This is great news. Currently I export to MODO to subdivide low poly objects when rendering in Octane. So this would be extremely great for the upcoming Reality 3 as LuxRender doesn’t smooth as well as Poser.

How does it work? Can it be base to groups, Figures, props or is it the entire scene that would be subdivide? Can you pose a figure after it has been subdivided?

Keep up the awesome work!

Let me explain how this works first, and then if anyone wants to have a go with it then PM me here or at RDNA and I'll send a link to it.

I'm wary about sharing it widely at the moment because:

• There are no instructions
• It's not properly tested
• It MODIFIES your scene
• Somebody somewhere will ruin their scene and be angry with me :-)

If you can live with those issues and risks, then I'll happily give it to ya :-D

Anyway ...

The script's strategy is this:

• Select a figure (only figures at the moment)
• Export the figure as an OBJ to a temporary location, in its posed and morphed state
• Import the temporary OJB as an intermediate prop
• Rip a load of data out of the intermediate prop
• Use that data to construct a new geometry, subdivided
• Recreate the original material zones and assign polys appropriately
• Delete the intermediate prop
• Hide the original figure

So, the original figure remains in the scene, but hidden. All conformed clothing and parented props etc. remain conformed and parented to the invisible figure.

Sounds a bit cumbersome when you write it all down but it seems to work quite smoothly.

The undo works simply by deleting the new geometry and setting the original figure to Visible again.

The subdivision should be the last thing you do before rendering.

If you want to modify your scene afterwards, then use the undo feature and do the subdivision again next time you render.

Quote - > Quote - For existing content smoothing seemed more appropriate. Your experiments look fine, but have you tried a high end figure?

I agree.

For my own renders I'll probably just stick to Poser's smoothing, which does an excellent job. This was just for fun really, to see if it could be done.

As for high end figures, I'm not sure what you mean. The benefit of this is to be seen on low poly figures, rather than high poly, if that's what you mean.

I've tried it on Aiko 3 and it works fine...

Muddled thinking on my part. Low end figure is more what we need. Of course the meshes we see are refined subd meshes. We should try a low poly control mesh. If not Genesis then maybe the Antonia team could supply it.

If the SM people chose to implement this it would be a lot of work, since they'd have to get it right. There'd be a new section in the cr2 to specify crease edges and control when and when not to subdivide.

Your experiment is very helpful at quantifying the benefit. It is not worth doing if the final result is not much better or faster than the smoothing option.

So basicaly it creates a sub-d prop and hides the figure? (not trying to belittle this by putting it into simple terms, just tring to make sure my simple brain understands it)

Quote - So basicaly it creates a sub-d prop and hides the figure? (not trying to belittle this by putting it into simple terms, just tring to make sure my simple brain understands it)

Exactly

Colorcurvature wrote a script that runs in Python outside of Poser.  It subdivides the obj and preserves the morphs.  It works prettty well except there were some smoothing issues. I think he moved on to other things,  but I'm sure he has some insights to share...

I don't mean with your script, but an automatic solution in general.

(I am thinking ahead about trees and buildings; large objects where only a small part might be close to the camera.)

Renders in Poser are with smoothing on and angle at 180

First picture is before subd in Poser

This was a simple first test. But it shows that subd can do here what smoothing cannot

Quote - Snarlygribbly : I have no idea your education about modeling App's ,SubD meshes ect ect.
For all I know your the master at zBrush.
So forgive my igonrace.
I do get your trying to help. Thanks a lot.

If your going to make your mesh a SubD you half to model it a certain way.
If it's modeled wrong the eyes could do bad things.

A well modeled SubD mesh will be 100% quads .no triangles.
Charactor polycount around 20,000.
Most Poser meshes probably not the best meshes to test your SubD plug.
V3 was not made for SubD.
V4 was but her polycount is to high.

Genensis would be the best mesh to use for testing your SubD plug.

Good Luck

It's not made for V3 or V4...why the heck would ya wanna subdivide something that's smooth enough? Only really low rez stuff you'd wanna subdivide.

Geeze.

Laurie

Quote - This was a simple first test. But it shows that subd can do here what smoothing cannot

Yes, but let's bear in mind that what it did here was reconstruct an improperly exported shape. If the DAZ thingy would export the first subd level as it should, then we would get exactly the same shape in the render.

I can see the advantages of subd at the modelling stage. Staying at low poly and being able to make sweeping changes without being bogged down by huge numbers of polys.

What are the advantages of having subd as a preprocessing stage before a render in Poser? If it just blindly does the whole scene I can see none. May as well do the subd in the modelling software, as it is done now.

The only advantage I can see is in conjunction with LOD, to gain speed.

Awaiting to be corrected by the more knowledgable people :-)

Quote - It's not made for V3 or V4...why the heck would ya wanna subdivide something that's smooth enough? Only really low rez stuff you'd wanna subdivide.

Geeze.

I think what Rorrkonn tried to say was that V4 was designed with subd.

Obviously the model was already exported subdivided.

This is indeed a very useful script if you want to use genesis in Poser

First one before

Quote - Second one after

Yup .. that seems to have made a difference!

Good to see that the script might have some use :-D