Quote - I figured out a brilliant solution!  All I have to do now is convince everyone to scale up the default size of all their Poser content by 1000% and there we go.

Stop looking at me like that... ;-p

 

On a more serious note, I'm going to finish this shaving kit up and get it released soon, even with the odd rendering problem.  I'll include a note about it in the release so people who run into it will know what's going on and what to do about it.

I would still very much love to figure out what is really causing this.  What factors contribute to it so I'm hoping this thread will remain active.  As I have time I'll continue to experiment further.  I may also try other modelling software when possible just to see if this happens with any small OBJ regardless of what software created it or if some don't have that problem.   I think Laurie mentioned she'd never encountered it and uses Wings3D, so may investigate that (just bookmarked their webpage).

Laurie, could you tell me a little about the geometry of your meshes.  Specifically, how many vertices do they have on average, just a ballpark number.  How dense is the mesh?  I'm wondering if this might be caused by Poser not being able to handle too many vertices in a small geometry.  Just guessing really but since I can scale the very same object up in Poser and the problem suddenly stops it made me wonder about that.  What changes when you change the scale, the vertices move.  So that led me to wonder if too densely packed vertices in a small object might somehow cause it.

I also wondered about how the shadow resembled the bounding box / margin cage as its variously called.  So in Blender I experimented with resizing it.  I didn't expect that to eliminate the problem, but neither did it change the size of the shadow which I found odd.  Perhaps Poser redefines its own bounding box during import and sets the size?  Is there an error in the way it does that with small objects perhaps?  Not sure but just puzzling things out.  If I could pinpoint the cause it might be something SM could fix in a patch.

My meshes normally tend to the medium to heavy poly side ;). Because I do mostly clothes and smart props that fit a certain figure, I use the figure to model around. When I work in Wings with a Poser figure, I normally work 20x Poser size, because Poser's scale is so ridiculously small. If I do it at Poser's size, I am unable to zoom in close enough without getting clipping no matter how I set the camera. When I export, I simply export at 0.05 and everything fits just fine in Poser. And no, I never have gotten a black mesh.

Laurie