This is an old, old bugbear, and I've finally decided that I have to get to the bottom of this. I've done a large batch of test renders and it'll take a few posts to get them all uploaded, so it may initially seem like a bit of a monologue... ;o)

But if anybody has any thoughts/comments on this subject then please do post them here.

First, the problem - in real life 'sharp' edges/corners are rarely actually 'sharp'. Look at your desk, or the door, or the window frame, or the building outside your window, etc. Look at the 'sharp' edges and corners on them - no, they're not really sharp at all.

(Yes, of course, if you're far enough away they will appear sharp, but I'm looking at them from quite close - I want to see that noticeably rounded effect that most real world 'sharp' edges produce. Actually I want to see a bumpy pitted rounded edge effect but I'll go onto that a bit later...)

Let's start with something simple, the most basic cube mesh - 8 vertices, 12 edges, 6 faces. If you render such a cube in any version of Poser with default settings you get very sharply defined edges/corners.

If you tick Poser's 'Smooth Polys' render setting, then when rendered those edges/corners will be smoothed as if the cube's been inflated almost to bursting point - not what I'm after at all.

You can bevel the edges of the cube in a modelling program. Now when render in Poser with default settings those edges don't look so sharp. But when you look close instead of each sharp 90° edge you now have two sharp 45° edges. If you then tick 'Smooth Polys' and render the balloonish inflation isn'tso bad, but it's still noticeable.

I remember reading somewhere, ages ago, that adding an edge loop on each side of each bevel, such that the newly created faces adjacent to the bevel faces are a similar size to the bevel, could help in controlling how subdivision (and thus Poser's 'Smooth Polys') affected the bevels.

So I've created a test object - a simple cube, plus a disc-with-a-hole surrounding it. I then duplicated this and added a bevel to each of the edges I want to be 'sharp'-but-in-a-rounded-way. I then duplicated this bevelled version and added edge loops either side of each bevel.

Image below shows the mesh, a Poser 6 (yes, six - this is an old, old conundrum!) render using default render settings (except that quality has been slid up to 'Final'), and another Poser 6 render with everything the same except that 'Smooth Polys' has been checked

And here are the settings, etc, just to be complete (note: material settings are for the follow-on tests in the next few posts).

I mentioned in the OP that what I'm really after is a bumpy, pitted rounded edge effect. I can either use Bump or Displacement for that, and I've done tests with both.

But bump (and more specifically displacement) can throw up other problems, especially when you have lights and shadows. So I've thrown the following into the mix as well:

Shadows: depth-mapped or ray-traced **Ambient Occlusion: **enabled or disabled Surface 'roughness', handled in Poser as Bump or Displacement.

The tests in the image below use the Bump channel only with various shadow/AO/smoothing - Poser 6 again:

And now the same set of tests but using Displacement, not bump.Poser 6 again:

All of the tests so far have left the crease angle at 80°, so here's a couple of simple tests (bump only) using 35° and 110° - Poser 6:

Okay, so Poser 6 is rather old. So here are some of the tests in Poser 9 and PoserPro 2014. And of course with themyou have an additional IDL (indirect lighting) render option,so I've done tests with that as well (I left AO on for the IDL tests) :

Okay, monologue part of this thread over.

Comments and observations are now most welcome !

As a Poser user are 'sharp' edges an annoyance to you? If so then what's your favourite method of avoiding them? Do you create models for Poser? If so then what approach do you use for 'sharp' edges?

Use control loops (the closer the loop is to the angle the less it will be smoothed) or, if your modeler supports it, you can take advantage of assigning smoothing groups by tagging polys in the .obj. Max, modo, and IIRC UVMapper pro allow you to assign smoothing groups. Here's an old thread that I participated in when I went by the user name primorge, its got some useful information and opinions on the subject...

Poser Smoothing

Yeah, I create figures and models for Poser (to answer your last question). I'm a noob. :D My stuff at ShareCG

Thanks EldritchCellar - the full title of the linked thread, "Modelling having poser smoothing in mind?", nicely encapsulates the first part of what I'm wondering about here, and your explanation is just what I was looking for.

I'm still looking at my renders to try and work out exactly what the second part of my problem is... something to do with the effect of the various light/shadow setups (including AO and IDL) in conjunction with bump or displacement, and how best to avoid those black artefacts near the meshlines. I need to try out a few things and do a couple of closer renders of the edges.

Smoothing groups is something I don't use - I think that's because a few years back I realized that if I'm using displacement then cracks between smoothing groups are almost unavoidable (and I'm a bit of a displacement fiend).

P.S. I like your Missus ! Just downloading her now...

(sometimes I really wish that I could convert the jumbled mess in my head into a couple of pictures and a few sentences, instead of the overload that I end up with.. :oS )

"something to do with the effect of the various light/shadow setups (including AO and IDL) in conjunction with bump or displacement, and how best to avoid those black artefacts near the meshlines. I need to try out a few things and do a couple of closer renders of the edges."

I have some thoughts on the things you've said. With grayscale bump or displacement it's always best to run your maps into a math subtract with value_1 set at 1 and value 2 set at 0.5. Map goes into value 1 and this node into the root.

Black mesh artifacts that closely resemble the edges of the model. These are brought about by raytracing, if you disable raytrace shadows they go away. Not an optimal solution. Try raising your shadow min. bias above values 0.350, or disable smoothing, or SubD the mesh. I've found that displacement exacerbates these artifacts; try easing up a little on the displacement in combination with raising the min. bias. Usually you can find a sweet spot between those values and postwork the rest. They are a PITA though.

Or, you may be referring to IDL splotchies appearing at mesh intersections, especially on walls or in figures at the lids and lips. Only solution I know for that is to add low intensity points strategically and correspondingly lower your main light intensity to balance. You want all those bounces to get into the nooks and crannies. Apparently IDL splotchies are a thing of the past with Superfly.

And those 2 posts cover just about every kind of render artifact I've run into. Barring flipped normals and other such extreme cases.

3dcheapskate posted at 10:37AM Sat, 16 January 2016 - #4249465

Okay, monologue part of this thread over.

Comments and observations are now most welcome !

As a Poser user are 'sharp' edges an annoyance to you? If so then what's your favourite method of avoiding them? Do you create models for Poser? If so then what approach do you use for 'sharp' edges?

I use control loops as well...it's really the best way to keep sides that meet that corner flat and the corner from not being perfectly sharp.

Laurie

LaurieA: I've just done another few tests using control loops (with and without bevels) as per EldritchCellar/primorge's other thread. Control loops alone (4) don't seem to work if I render with displacement and smoothing, but control loops plus bevel (5) do (slash-separated numbers are vertices/edges/faces). Meshes (3) and (5), both with control loops plus bevels, seem to work best here - but both have meshline/shadow artefacts, which is the second part of what I'm looking at...

EldritchCellar: I still haven't fully formulated my questions regarding the black shadow/meshline artefacts, but I think you've answered them already! :D (However, I'm still going to attempt to formulate my questions just in case there's something you haven't answered yet)

I often forget to convert the 0.0 to 1.0 range value of a displacement map to -0.5 to +0.5, but I remembered to do that here. That will obviously help any displacement related artefacts by halving the maximum displacement produced by the shader while keeping the range of displacement (although I think I've seen problems peculiar to negative displacement,although that may just be be befuddled memory confusing things - which is another reason that I wanted to get this big batch of test renders uploaded)

I'm fairly sure that using depth-mapped shadows without AO or IDL avoids just about all these light/shadow/meshline artefacts even with my large displacements.

As you said ray-traced shadows seem to be the major cause - I sometimes think it looks as if the ray-traced shadows are cast by the undisplaced mesh (which could be why I think negative displacements may cause additional problems?), but other times I think that can't be right...

I've also found that AO is also a big cause of meshline artefacts for the materials I like playing with (e.g. the "Sand Test" picture in my gallery here picture

I know I've seen artefacts with IDL but they're not showing on the renders I've uploaded so far on this thread.More test renders required.

_P.S. I've also found that combining noise, cloud, etc nodes with whatever I have plugged into bump and/or displacement can go some way towards making the artefacts less obvious... _

Cough ! Ahem ! Did you spot my deliberate mistake ? I left the crease angle at default 80 degs, so mesh (4) with just control edges splits apart at the 90 degree edges.

Here's the correction, hopefully before LaurieA, EldritchCellar or anybody else point out my stupid mistake in the previous post ! Increasing crease angle above 90 allows smoothing to work on them, and the control edges limit the extent of the smoothing to something sensible.

So using just control edges as in mesh 4, along with a suitable crease angle of course, seems the be the polygon-lightest (about 4 times as many vertices/edges/faces as my initial mesh 1) answer to the mesh part of this problem.

Now to investigate the causes of the black shadowy meshline-related artefacts - even though EldritchCellar has already explained them

This time I've zoomed in on mesh 4 (note: the control edges are approximately an inch away from the main edges), and I've set the shader to give a fixed +0.5 inch displacement. Here's what I get with a few selected shadow, AO and IDL settings:

IDL splotchiness and ray-traced shadows seem to be the main cause of artefacts here, exactly as EC said. The AO artefacts are less obvious.

The duodecagonal (12-sided) nature of the disc-with-a-hole is quite clear. Although the smoothing rounds out the original edges, it's now the control edges that are making the 12-sided nature stand out. But in the "Cough ! Ahem !" post above, with an uneven displacement this seemed to be quitenicely obscured.

Same mesh 4, but giving the material a fixed negative displacement of -0.5 inch (setting Sky_Color and Cloud_Color to black). I get odd sticky-out bits at the corners of the cube, but I don't see any additional artefacts, so maybe I was imagining those.?

I'd guess the sticky-out bits are something to do with the displacement being almost as big as the distance between the main edges and the control edges ?

I can model any thing but I struggle to texture a cube. Substance Live is correcting that but them cubes ,gezz ;)

Poser threw in SubD's in 2014.Hence why V4 has a ridicules high poly count. So make your 3D dodecagon edges high polycount like ya did with ya #5. I'd render your mesh with SubD's activated.

All the .jpgs you posted ,no UVMap.Your odd artifacts around the edges are they where the UVMap seems are ?

Could it matter how you make your maps depending on what App , lights and render engine you use ?

I wouldn't turn bumps on very high.

In case you start missing with Normals Tangents are important for Normal maps.

The CGI Artist bagginsbill ,helpful for texturing info.

Looking at the ray-traced shadow artefact on the disc-with-a-hole I suddenly thought "the shadow size seems to be related to the distance between the mesh and the smoothed-displaced surface". Here's the mesh overlaid on a render (front view, both from screenshots of the Poser window so they do match):

Hmmm... I'd expected to see minimum difference at the vertices, maximum difference half-way between. But it seems the opposite is true ?

Ah! If I do the same but with NO displacement...

Looking at the hole in the duodecagonal disc the gaps between the meshlines and the smoothed rendered surface seem to match the appearance of the ray-traced shadow artefacts.

• Could it be that the ray-tracing is casting shadows from the UNsmoothed mesh, but catching them on the smoothed mesh ?
  • (If so, where is displacement taken into account for both casting and catching?)
• There's also the possibility that I'm barking up the wrong tree...

Just a sidenote - I get the same ray-traced shadow artefacts using just Bump, no Displacement,so maybe that "where is displacement taken into account for both casting and catching" isn't relevant.

Part 2 of the monologue is over !

RorrKonn posted at 3:14PM Sun, 17 January 2016 - #4249672

I can model any thing but I struggle to texture a cube. Substance Live is correcting that but them cubes ,gezz ;)

Poser threw in SubD's in 2014.Hence why V4 has a ridicules high poly count. So make your 3D dodecagon edges high polycount like ya did with ya #5. I'd render your mesh with SubD's activated.

All the .jpgs you posted ,no UVMap.Your odd artifacts around the edges are they where the UVMap seems are ?

Could it matter how you make your maps depending on what App , lights and render engine you use ?

I wouldn't turn bumps on very high.

In case you start missing with Normals Tangents are important for Normal maps.

The CGI Artist bagginsbill ,helpful for texturing info.

Missed your post due to being in monologue mode again.

I've got PP2014, but I'm still mainly using P9 - in fact I only stopped using P6 as my main version about a year ago. Haven't tried (haven't even noticed!) the subd option in PP2014 - should probably take a look.

High polycount meshes - for some reason (lack of modelling skills mainly) I prefer to use a very simple mesh and then apply huge displacements for the twiddly bits. Probably why I run into the problems I have here... LOL
Advice to keep bump/displacement small is definitely good, but a persistent voice inside my head keeps on nagging away to dial up the displacement,and I always give in.

UVs - no, the example meshes I'm using aren't UV mapped. This is all related to the stone shader/room prop freebie I recently uploaded - the morphs for the roomprop stretch faces from almost nothing to huge - so any UV mapping would get ridiculously distorted. I'm trying to work out what edgeloops to put into the columns to allow me to create a nice selection of column morphs that'll work with the 2 inch displacement I use on the stone shader.

I created a few normal maps for Poser a few years back, but I've forgotten most of what I thought I knew. Tangent space rings a bell - bluish? I also recall having to invert/swap axes from Blender-baked normal maps to get them correct for Poser/DS - messing around with colour channels in GIMP or something like that?

And bagginsbill ? Yes indeed - who needs a material room manual when there's a bagginsbill ...

Sharp edges used to be a big problem for me. It no longer is.

For close-ups, where the edges will be noticeable, I use models with the aboveformentioned edge loops. But it's not always possible. Bump maps, displacement maps, specular maps, plus a little experimenting with the blend nodes seems to fix things for me. I always render with IDL and gamma correction turned on, and I rarely bother with smooth polygons. And that's something to watch out for with your non-color maps: a higher than 1.0 gamma setting on them can cause all sorts of artifacts if you render with GC on. But if you experiment a bit in the mat room, you can usually get a decent enough compromise.

moriador: it took me a while to work out that control edges can do the job without a bevel ! And I'd agree that a bit of creative playing in the material room can improve the appearance of sharp edges, as long as they're not too close up. And I recall reading a few threads/posts that mentioned bump/displacement maps (or more generally any greyscale maps) and gamma correction. I think the advice was that they should use 1.0 (but I may be wrong - I can't track theURLs down at the moment).

I guess that 'smooth polys' is something most people don't think about unless they see the ballooning effect, or they get sharp edges in the render where they expect smooth curves. I know that I'm not usually certain whether I've got it on or off !

Most app's use normal maps for smooth low polycount meshes.I've never used normal in Poser so can't say for sure.

Don't think pong shading will balloon a mesh .I think Displacement maps will balloon a mesh cause gray 50 will not balloon in or out but any other setting will.

RorrKonn posted at 11:49AM Tue, 19 January 2016 - #4249900

Most app's use normal maps for smooth low polycount meshes.I've never used normal in Poser so can't say for sure.

Don't think pong shading will balloon a mesh .I think Displacement maps will balloon a mesh cause gray 50 will not balloon in or out but any other setting will.

I guess most 3D apps are aimed at game dev, and normal maps + low poly mesh is the only way to get multiple frames per second in real time? The many hours / overnight renders people seem to do in Poser aren't an option.

But it's strange that people seem to prefer bump maps to normal maps in Poser/DS when normal maps are (as far as I can tell) better ? I guess bump maps are easier to create - so many models just seem to cheat with a greyscale version of the texture.

Yeah, displacement (and/or the 'Smooth Polys' render setting) are the only things I know of in Poser/DS that cause a mesh to be rendered in a ballooned-in/out manner. (Although quads where one vertex isn't in the same plane as the other 3 also curve the rendered mesh). Great when that's what you're after, rather amusing when it isn't.

Normal vs Bump Poser

Nice link again (I do wish I could write short, to the point, posts like yours!)

Would be killer if we could plug Substance Live in to Poser and all app's had the same X.Y.Z. axis and same tangents etc etc.

I never went to any CGI university. I learned and still learn buy follow the best CGI Artist. I'd get a mesh like your making and see how they textured there's. See what and how they made there maps and follow that path to get you started. But I always strive to out do them.

for each and ever app you aim to use or sell your meshes. Unreal and Unity requires you to make two different normals. but 2 burns ,not a problem. and if you don't need a normal SL burns a lot of different maps like height maps. I just Love SL to much. it's a better invention then fire or the wheel ;)

Ah ha! A couple of weeks ago I was exporting some assets as obj and wondering why on import they were curving in odd ways. Set crease angle to 0, and ta da! Forgot all about that.

On the smooth polys, if I need them on an asset, I'll turn them off on everything in the scene and then turn them back on the items that need it. Thankfully, scenefixer does this in one shot. Generally, though, I find I only really need smoothing on things like tree branches and so on. But this is going to depend heavily on what sort of assets you're rendering, I think. A sci-fi scene full of precisely modelled architectural elements is going to need a lot more love and care than an old stone ruin where you can go crazy with bump and displacement.

Read this on page 196 of Poser Pro Reference Manual.pdf

Smooth Polygons: Checking the Smooth Polygons checkbox causes Poser to smooth the body part’s polygons at render time to eliminate or reduce a “faceted” appearance caused by flat polygons. This option can cause sharp corners to appear round. If the affected body part has sharp edges that you wish to preserve while applying polygon smoothing to other angles, you should specify those sharp edges using smoothing groups or the crease angle threshold, as polygon smoothing will not override these settings. See “Smoothing Geometry” on page 422 for more information on specifying hard versus smooth edges.

Another simple test and I think the use of control edges is now clear to me. I think I added them correctly? The results look correct.

Basically it's what EldritchCellar said !

(Simple mesh = 24 vertices/22 faces, with control edges = 200 vertices/198 faces. So almost 10 times as many vertices/faces,but the results speak for themselves)

One big question - is there any way to avoid the control edges alongside the diagonals on the horizontal surfaces?

Trying to get rid of the control edges either side of the diagonal edges on the horizontal surfaces (because they don't serve any purpose here*) I end up with unavoidable pairs of triangles which don't render nicely with smoothing + ray-traced shadows (but did I get a similar thing with the control edges there? I didn't look closely at the bottom right render in the previous post)

*except that without them I have the problems noted...

Yes, there were artefacts in the same place with the control edges on the diagonals too, but they were hardly noticeable

RorrKonn posted at 11:23AM Mon, 25 January 2016 - #4250063

Would be killer if we could plug Substance Live in to Poser and all app's had the same X.Y.Z. axis and same tangents etc etc.

I never went to any CGI university. I learned and still learn buy follow the best CGI Artist. I'd get a mesh like your making and see how they textured there's. See what and how they made there maps and follow that path to get you started. But I always strive to out do them.

for each and ever app you aim to use or sell your meshes. Unreal and Unity requires you to make two different normals. but 2 burns ,not a problem. and if you don't need a normal SL burns a lot of different maps like height maps. I just Love SL to much. it's a better invention then fire or the wheel ;)

I've also learnt what I know from playing with stuff, not from courses (which may be why so much of what I 'know' is wrong! LOL). I've never been interested in computer games - the stuff I make is just for Poser and DAZ Studio, and for my own use (although the least cr*ppy things I also upload as freebies). And from what I (think I) know a good game mesh is not (necessarily) a good Poser mesh ?

Also much of the commercial Poser architectural stuff I've bought (even by the 'best', the most popular, and/or the most well known vendors) contains those long, thin triangles that Poser doesn't like, and most of it uses the default crease angle (80) and bevels. (I don't think that any of them have 'Smooth Polygons' unchecked, which I now see is important if you want such models to work with Poser's render-time smoothing enabled).

I'm fairly sure that none of the models I've bought use control edges, and if any do I doubt they have the crease angle set appropriately - if they did then I think that the non-sharp edges would've struck me instantly as being exactly what I was after, and I would've examined the mesh and prop settings.

moriador posted at 12:03PM Mon, 25 January 2016 - #4250375

Ah ha! A couple of weeks ago I was exporting some assets as obj and wondering why on import they were curving in odd ways. Set crease angle to 0, and ta da! Forgot all about that.

On the smooth polys, if I need them on an asset, I'll turn them off on everything in the scene and then turn them back on the items that need it. Thankfully, scenefixer does this in one shot. Generally, though, I find I only really need smoothing on things like tree branches and so on. But this is going to depend heavily on what sort of assets you're rendering, I think. A sci-fi scene full of precisely modelled architectural elements is going to need a lot more love and care than an old stone ruin where you can go crazy with bump and displacement.

I use snarly's scenefixer a lot, mainly getting rid of detached nodes (I love cut-and-pasted in the material room so I get a lot of that)- hadn't even noticed the crease angle/smoothing ! (I really need to learn to observe rather than just look ;o)

And the word 'asset' always makes me laugh, mainly because it makes be think of company 'mission statements' but also because (in that company context) it also makes me think of holes ! LOL

I was looking at one of Stonemason's models and I noticed he was using bevels with tris at the corners (a no no in poser with smoothing) and also very little in the way of control edges. Smoothing groups. He confirmed this to me in a thread he happened to pop into a while ago, he said that he doesn't use control edges (which are all quads)... consequently his models aren't really SubD friendly.

Explains how he can model such elaborate things at very low poly counts.

I'm on this post to learn also. So I can't say what's what ,only ask why. Poser did make a game dev so I'm guessing game mesh are acceptable for Poser now ,I guess it might depend on what render engine your using. DAZ makes game characters for Unity ,not Studio. That's just funny to me. Poser reminds me of a junk yard car ,they get parts from here and there and then see's what happens. They got Blenders & Octane render engines and Pixars SubD's. octane and superfly is as far apart as you can get.

I haven't read or tested “Smoothing Geometry” on page 422 yet. but smoothing groups & crease angle threshold, sounds more important then polygon smoothing.

Once I learn Substance Live. I aim to terrorize Poser ,guess I'll learn one way or the other what Poser can ,can't do.

poly count 6 with,with out normal.SL real time render engine.

EldritchCellar posted at 1:11AM Mon, 25 January 2016 - #4251108

I was looking at one of Stonemason's models and I noticed he was using bevels with tris at the corners (a no no in poser with smoothing) and also very little in the way of control edges. Smoothing groups. He confirmed this to me in a thread he happened to pop into a while ago, he said that he doesn't use control edges (which are all quads)... consequently his models aren't really SubD friendly.

Explains how he can model such elaborate things at very low poly counts.

Would be nice if they would post wireframes ,DAZ Poser venders never do. Don't even give polycounts or file sizes. which all is a prerequisite on pro sites.

Yeah, I really like looking at wireframes. I think wireframe rendering is quite beautiful if done well. Especially on low to medium res organic models and nurbs style hard surface stuff with strong design.

Just posted my* Warpy Cube at ShareCG (can't link to it because of the ****ing stupid rules here). My first successful foray into control edges. An 8' x 8' cube with +/- 4' (yes four feet, not inches) displacement (I told you I'm a displacement fiend!). As well as the Poser prop (which also has a few morphs) I uploaded a 10 second video of the cube going all amoeboid. Except the video didn't upload.

*I say 'my' but it's really just primorge's/EldritchCellar's cube-with-control-edges from this post in the Poser Smoothing thread that he linked to - but I did think of the name ! ;o)