Forum: Poser - OFFICIAL


Subject: Mirror or "flipping" an item?

DarkElegance opened this issue on Mar 09, 2015 ยท 7 posts


Morkonan posted Tue, 10 March 2015 at 1:29 PM

A question about this "mirroring" effect - Does it only reverse the winding order of the object or does it actually recreate a mirrored object, but retains a relative winding order?

The reason I ask is that for something like OpenGL preview rendering, winding order matters and it will interpret the face normals based on the winding order of the vertices that define them. (Face Culling) If, for instance, you want to make a mirror version of a piece of clothing, hair, or anything else in Poser, you can do that by using something like a 3D modeler or even UVMapper to reverse the winding order/create mirrored object. But, if you import it or use it as a morph target, it will appear in an OpenGL render as if it's face normals are backward. They aren't, technically speaking, it's just that the preview renderer is using the vertice information to calculate that normal and the vertices are telling it that the faces were constructed to face away from the camera...

In conclusion, if you could mirror an object and keep all the vertice references relative, so that the faces appear to be drawing correctly (clockwise vertice winding order), then the object would look fine in OpenGL rendering and could be used for things like creating reverse morphs for hair, clothing, whatever...

Note: This is in ref to both the DS "mirroring" and any products offered here on Rendo, for those that know about them. Also, I'm speaking only to how OpenGL manages face culling and how it uses winding order, not face normals, to do that. I'm not speaking to Firefly, here, when describing these effects.