The model of a suction-dredger-sub with an untelescoping suction tube that I showed before, has shown yet another reason for wanting to be able to set the maximum smoothing angle like I can in Bryce. The picture is an axial cross-section of its suction tube. The magenta squares are vertexes. I untelescope the tube segments using their Ztran channels, which I have un-hiddened by text-editing the CR2. The tube segments are accurately concentric and along the Z-axis. But yet when I render, the back end of each tube segment often sticks out of the side of the next larger segment. I suspect that each tube segment is being displayed as grossly distended into club shape at its end by the smoothing process as shown by the dotted line. This a nuisance. Rather than hacks to stop this from happening, why can't I simply set the maximum smoothing angle to c.80 deg to keep mechanical objects looking mechanical, as I routinely do in Bryce?? - OK, Poser was meant for models of humans, as is shown by Poser 3's three lights being by default brown & grey & flesh, and always I have to reset them to white to avoid discoloration of the render; and the default material's default color is flesh, whereby in my early Poser days my New Figures thumbnails contained oddities like e.g. a flesh-colored flamethrower, until I learned how to handle **usemtl** lines and Poser materials. But please, consider this, someone.

And all the segments involved are set to non-curve & non-bend.

In DXF format every face is separate and has its own copies of the coordinates of its corners; has no vertex list like OBJ and 3DS formats have. (That is why translating an object to DXF and back to OBJ shuffles the vertexes and messes up morph target vertex matching.) So likely when Poser translates DXF into OBJ, each face's line's vertex numbers point to its own set of entries in the vertex list, and every face is a separate small "object". DXF format is not very clever for 3D graphics. It was intended to describe engineering drawings, and its instruction 3DFACE that defines a 3D mesh polygon is merely an aside.

What I've been doing is adding some extra vertices the the edges I want sharp. Very narrow faces next to the faces I want to be flat. The Little faces will absorb all the smoothing leaving my edges sharp. The blades on the Ice Skates I just made are done that way. So poser will leave the flat stuff flat.

In the case of my suction-dredger-sub:- (1) Finally I unwelded the end faces of the suction tube segments from the inside and outside surfaces. (2) Those things clean up ALL the rubbish that gets into the sea round, if you try poaching shellfish round here. (3) But still, why is the rounding angle limit set so fierce? As I said, in Bryce in my experience everything that should be smoothed, is smoothed, even if I set maximum smoothing angle to 80deg to avoid smoothing right-angles, or even if I set it to 50deg to avoid smoothing 60deg edges on hexagonal nuts and bolt heads in the model.

Look into the discussion of the "room problem" Maz and I are having. My solution is like yours: detach perpendicular faces AND assign them different materials so Poser will make hard edges. Maz is working with chamfer objects and discovering why poser's own cube prop shows clean edges. I think he'll discover an easier way.

In the Poser 3 "box" prop, each face is unwelded from the others, and also each face is 10*10 = 100 square polygons, not one only. The Poser 3 "square" prop is 2 coincident square faces, not welded, anticlockwise in opposite directions, and those faces are thus:- fo 1/1 2/3 3/4 4/2 fo 8/2 7/4 6/3 5/1 where "fo" is an obsolete code = "face outline" which now means the same as "f".

Exporting Poser's box props and then transforming them is not always an option since any boolean operation "destroys" the box. I think the detaching faces and assigning materials method is the only one working so far.

The telescopic tubes of my sub have these 4 Poser materisls: suctiontube (outsides), suctiontubeinside (insides), suctiontubeedge (front edges), suct_backedge (back edges), and yet Poser's renderer rounded those edges, until I unwelded them. Compare my Bryce render of the sub returning to dock, with all right-angle edges left sharp as I intended. - It seems that 3D mesh booleaning doesn't like objects which are not (complete bags of polygons with no loose edges).