I'm at a loss as to what is causing all these bugs that I see in my jacket OBJ. I've pulled this OBJ apart quite literally I dont know how many times. I reversed faces, smoothed, joined, split and reworked a dozen problem areas. Then when I render I still get the problems as seen in the image above. I've marked and numbered the problem areas to ease the commenting and so you'll see what I'm talking about. Nos 1,2,4 are still reversed faces problems I think (correct me if I'm wrong). No 3 I have no idea why I get this lovely texture when I render. I'd hate to release this thing and then hear gripes because of No 3's rendering problem. Help is greatly needed here!!! Thanks in advance!

Dave I've just been having simaler problems with a prop I've built. Everything looks fine in my modeler, but when I get it into poser and render, I get holes just like that. I've traced the problem to 2 different stages. The first seams to be a problem I introduced when I put the model into lightwave and reduced the number of poly's. The second is how the model was converted to obj. This problem had me crying for over a week, before I said sod it and went with my high poly source model. In the end I just used the free version of painter 3d that came with poser to convert my model before running it through uvmapper. Problem number 3 looks just like parts of the poly reduced version of my model. In my case I think, it was an artifact of the poly reduction process. What kind of process you went through to get your model in poser ? Don't know if this is any kind of help, or just going off on a long tangent. Thats life when your borde at work. Kris

Problems 1,2 and 4 definately look like you've got a few polygons reversed. Problem 3... hmmm... that's an odd one for sure. It looks like some problems I've seen with triangulated meshes (as opposed to using mostly quads), but I've never seen it quite that severe. It's kinda tough to guess much about it without seeing the mesh itself. I'd be willing/interested in taking a closer look if you can't figure it out (spanki@mindspring.com). BTW Kris, I've seen people mention several times - "the free version of painter 3d that came with poser" .... was this only included prior to Poser 4? I don't seem to have any Painter program on my disks.

I dont recall seeing it on either. I've got Poser 3 and 4 and neither of them came with Painter 3D. Dave

I believe 12, and 3 are slightly pinched poins, or points that are normal reversed. Try deleting thpolygons and just rebuilding new one and welding them to the mesh. Problem 4 is a stecthed mesh. I have had this happen. If you anti-alias do you still get it?

Actually, no, problem 3 is nothing to do with the mesh... it's the shadow map...

In addition to reversed polygons, you might have degenerate polygons (ones that form a line) or polygons where the first three points in the polygon form a line. This is important because some renderers (and this would seem to include Poser's) use the first three points in the polygon to calculate the direction of the normal. If your first three points are colinear, you get weird normals, and the polygons show up as dark spots that refuse to take a color or texture. UVMapper Pro will detect and correct degenerate, reversed, and colinear polygons if you ask it to. I don't remember whether or not UVMapper Classic does the same thing. Lynn Grant Castle Development Group

Yep the image above was anti-aliased. I tried that after I did the first render just to see if the anti-aliasing would solve anything. Looks like I'm gonna have to go back a few steps and start again :frown:

lGrant: UVMapper classic can detect degenerate polygons. I tried that thinking the same thing and turned up empty. Valandar: So problem 3 is just the shadow map? How do I adjust it to fix the problem?

Increase the size of the shadow map. Select the main light, and increase the shadow map size to about 1000

Kewl. Thanks. Now I just have to solve my other problems :frown:

"I've seen people mention several times - "the free version of painter 3d that came with poser" .... was this only included prior to Poser 4? I don't seem to have any Painter program on my disks." I have an older copy of Poser4 (pre-CuriousLabs), and Painter 3D is on one of the disks - I've heard very little that's positive about it, so I've never even installed it.

Hmmm. I'll have to check my CD and see if it's on mine. I really didnt look for anything else on there other than for Poser stuff.

My guesses would be 1) Reversed polys - UVmapper can cure those 2 and 4) I'll almost bet these are at seams between body parts. And that the buttons/band is a separate mesh from the jacket proper, but with some vertices from the jacket and band in the same place. Poser welds body parts together, and so, unfortunately, welds identical points from otherwise separate meshes , even on the same body parts, if they are at the edges between body parts. Sometimes it happens even when the identical vertices are NOT EVEN on a body part edge. Either way, resizing/moving usually helps. See pic above - before resizing the pockets on the left, and after resizing on the right. The smoothing in Poser makes this look like nasty dents in the mesh, even when you can't see any in a modeler. Try resizing or moving the band ever so slightly to make sure the jacket and band have no identical vertices. 3) Shadow map - try setting the shadow map size to 1024. Have fun.

heyas; just a note about the painter 3d for poser 4. painter and poser were, at that time, both metacreations products. when mc ditched all their proggies, painter and poser went their separate ways. so, if you got the curious labs version of poser 4, i believe the painter 3d is NOT included with it. i don't believe it ever came with p3.

bloodsong: I'm still looking for something that actually does what painter was supposed to do ... but for the price I couldn't beat it.

Spanki I bought Poser4 before MC sold it back to Curious. Personaly I only use it as a mesh converter. It's very clunky version. The import & export menu's just have "XXXX" where the mesh format should be. The obscenities I muttered whilst working out which was which. But having said that, Unlike some converters I've tried, It never crashes. Kris

Thanks.. I have the Curious Labs version of P4, so that makes sense.

Attached Link: http://209.15.136.215/

heyas; p3d (if you got it for free) ain't half bad.... it's 3/4 bad. it CAN be useful, however, if you use it with your regular 2d painting proggie. i have a tutorial on how to effectively use the sucker, on my site. it even tells you which xxx is obj import ;) if you paid for it, i pity you. ;)

Just my 2 cents' worth : It's not the 3D painting that's important - it's the UVmapping. Sure, BodyPaint and Deep Paint can do fantastic things - but so can Windows Paint, IF IT'S GOT A NICE, DISTORT-FREE MAP TO WORK ON. BP and DP can make such maps, but they tend to be useless WITHOUT the 3D painting app (the optimized maps are fragmented). A good UVmap (buy UVmapper Pro, it's a steal at the price) can be used by both you and anyone else with a painting app, any painting app. Personally, I admire BP and DP, but I wouldn't buy them until they are everyone-has-it apps. On the other hand, I'd pay handsomely for any app that made it automatic to derive a nice, flat UVmap from even the most complex object.

I solved my problem. Ended having to go back to the original and rework some things. If anyone's interested I'll post a pic later of the new version. OT - What about Painter 3d? Is it worth installing on the computer. I found I do have the app on my Poser 4 CD (from Metacreations).

Things are looking good. Comments?

heyas; good job, dave. what did you do? :) i use p3d on my templates, if i want to draw guidelines. for example, if i want to make a tiger or zebra-striped thing, i might draw the stripes on in p3d as a guide, for painting over in photoshop. but i only ever use it if i need to paint over seams. (or fix seam alignments.) you can draw/paint right on the model with it, but what drives everyone absolutely batty is that when you go over a seam, p3d drags your paintbrush all the way across your canvas to connect it to the other area of the mesh. so you can't really paint a continuous line around a limb, say. if you try, you'll get a huge streak across the whole image, crossing other parts of the mesh and all, and messing everything up. the way i use it, i sort of 'sneak up' on the seam on the model, and put guide dots where the stripe would align on either side. it isn't bad for a 2d app, just painter is not my forte', so i can't make it work as well as i'd like.

RE P3D: One problem with P3d is that it came without a manual. and it's buggy as heck. my major gripes with it are: 1)if you scale the model upwards you can't get it to scale back down. 2) the xyz axes to turn the model with the trackball are all screwed up. 3) And possably the most important - if you try to draw at the seam between front and back it messes up bigtime. (bloodsongs tut helps with this one but it's still frustrating.) Is it worth installing? depends: How patient are you? Do you want to run a program that acts like it was programmed by a six year old kid? How patient are you?

I went back to my original OBJ before I split into body parts. Reworked the trim mesh so that it had more points to deal with when I thickened it. That way the transitions were smoother. In the jacket area I either connected points that were leaving an open gap in the mesh or I deleted the points and added in new ones. Then went back to UVMapper and set up my groups and materials. Brought it into Poser, sized it the way I wanted and then exported out of Poser.