I experience long pauses with the Poser 6 Mat Room in general. If I double click on a material from the library palette, sometimes the nodes appear right away, sometimes they appear after a long pause, and sometimes they don't appear until I move the mouse. I know that sounds weird, but I always move the mouse now if I experience a delay in the Mat Room, and the nodes appear.

Jeff

Jim, you're right.

While removing the smoothing groups did remove the P6 rendering artifacts at the triangulated facet, it did not help at the interface between body parts. These would appear to be two different problems. I focused on the triangulated facet and was wrong to assume the fix would apply to both.

I'm not sure that any program should automatically, physically weld body part seams. That changes the geometry and would screw up morph targets. I don't think P5 does this. I do think that P5 is more forgiving than P6, applying some sort of smoothing that I can't turn off. Perhaps P6 has to do things differently, more strictly, to allow the new crease angle feature, or perhaps it is a bug.

Jeff

I think the problem is caused by a new feature of P6--Smoothing Groups.

The P6 manual discusses these. They're not required, but if they exist P6 respects them.

The geometry of the Jessi Pink Bra has embedded smoothing groups. If I create a prop at the offending areas and export as an obj, the obj keeps the smoothing groups. P5 seems to ignore them and renders without artifacts. If I then export from P5 as an obj, there are no smoothing groups. So, re-importing the P5-created obj into P6 renders OK because there are no smoothing groups.

Also, after editing out the smoothing groups from an obj exported from P6 leaving everything else the same, P6 renders without artifacts. The smoothing groups of the pink bra cause artifacts at the odd triangulated facets, AND at the interface between body parts. I don't think (but I really don't know enough) that smoothing groups can span body parts.

We need to learn more about the proper application of smoothing groups.

P5 can be a work-around here, and perhaps provide a clue to the problem. In P6, I untextured the object and saved to the figure library. For some reason I wasn't able to save to the Jessi Clothing library. I copied the saved files to the P5 runtime. I loaded the object in P5. It complained about the newer version but loaded anyway. I exported the object as an obj file, checking "Include body part names...", "Include figure names...", and "As Morph Target...". I made a subfolder of the Jessi Clothing folder and put a copy of the original ppz file there. I uncompressed the ppz file with the python utility. I edited the pp2 to point to the object that I exported from P5. I loaded the new clothing object and the artifacts are gone. The top picture is the P6 smooth lined mode preview of the new object. The bottom left is a P6 render of the original object, and the bottom right is a P6 render of the new object. This is a new picture, only 600 pixels wide ;-)

Message edited on: 06/16/2005 09:58

In my James render above, I think the horizontal artifact cutting across the lower left iris is actually the top edge of the lower lid.

I think James eye weirdness behind the refraction lens is related to the artifacts we see on transparent objects behind the lens when they're in close proximity to other objects, as when intersecting. I think the James eyeball object is actually two spheres, an outer and an inner, very close to each other. The entire outer sphere is assigned the EyeTrans material and is totally transparent, used for specular highlights. While not intersecting per se, the entire outer eyeball sphere is close enough to the inner eyeball sphere to suffer this artifact. Similarly, the lower eyelash is transparent, close to the lower lid, and also exhibits the artifact, making the eyeball appear to penetrate the lower lid.

Message edited on: 05/28/2005 10:21

Richardson, I scaled up with a cube and got the same results (not shown). I did use the default infinite lights which Poser doesn't allow to parent to the cube.

I rendered the scaled up (1000%) pz3 in P5 and got similar refraction disc artifacts, but spotted (a clue?). However the transparent ball intersection with the checkered ball had no artifacts, scaled up in P5 (not shown here).

odf, Curious about the bump map thing, I applied a Turbulence node to the bump node of the checkered ball in P6, unscaled. The refracted bump looked OK but the intersection artifacts were still there (not shown). I added James HiRes with bump map in front of the checkered ball and behind the lens (see the turbulence bump on the ball). I disconnected the bump map for the Head (so I could examine the eyes).

The refraction bump map artifacts are there, just like odf's renders, for the body. Are bitmap bump maps a culprit but not procedural bump maps? Also look at the eyes. The right eye is all of a sudden looking way left and penetrates the lower lid. Is that the pupil still looking straight? The left eye looks straighter, but also penetrates the lower lid,and there's some horizontal artifact cutting across the lower left iris.

This gets curiouser and curiouser.

Now this is a riot! I reran my test above, this time parenting everything to an independent sphere (not visible) and scaling the sphere to 1000%. I moved the camera back to reframe the shot and rendered. The artifacts near the intersection of the small transparent sphere and checkered sphere are still there but not as prevalent due to the change in scale. They seem limited to the proximity of the intersection. But look what else showed up. The same artifacts that I had before SR1. See those whitish discs around the top and down the left edge of the lens?

The problem happens when not using bump maps at all. Here, a small solid sphere is just poking out of a big checkered one behind a refracting lens object (left). Changing the small sphere to be totally transparent we see artifacts in the P6 render (center) but not in the P5 render (right). The artifacts occur in the region where the transparent object intersects another object. Notice the checker pattern appears in the artifact. (Perhaps OT, I remember Bryce having difficulty rendering transparent object intersections). P5 seemed to have this licked. So, what new code in P6 having to do with objects near each other, angles of objects near each other, intersecting objects, that might be causing this? Ambient occlusion, crease thresholding, something else entirely?

Message edited on: 05/27/2005 10:06

Uli,

Thanks. That explains how they "just appeared." Based on your suggestion, I saved my launch state from P5 as a pz3, loaded it into P6, and saved it as my launch state for P6. Now I have the P5 factory Draft and Production presets above the line, and my presets below the line, all the time. I'm a happy camper on this one.

Jeff

Sketch render animation problem happens to me too -- that's nasty, the program locks. Creating the animation works fine in P5. (While performing this test I chose to render quarter size and noticed P6 prefers the alternate spelling "Quater."

Other P6-isms that cause P6 to feel sluggish compared to P5 include:

Startup time, twice as long as P5 even though my P6 runtime is smaller than my P5 runtime.

After clicking File/New I have to click the bar on the libarary palette with the "down triangle" twice to get the pull down menu, only once in P5.

After double clicking on a material library preset from Basic Materials, the nodes may or may not appear right away in the material window. Sometimes the nodes stay invisible until I move the mouse.

The render settings Load Preset button at first revealed just a horizontal line, then after I saved some presets, the standard Draft and Production choices just appeared above the horzontal line with my presets below the line. Now after SR1, Draft and Production are gone again and I can't get them back.

All that said, SR1 installation went without a hitch, and seems to have fixed the refraction artifact problem I was having.

I used depth map shadows. -Jeff

face_off, yes I tried scaling up. Bill, I'm using windows P5 SR 4.1 (5.0.4.325). Thanks for your explanation. This sounds, sadly, like a limitation. Jeff

In this close up of Don's nose (object not scaled, default size) the left image is a raytrace shadow from a single infinite light with the default Shadow Min Bias of 0.8. I see dots in the shadow as the distance between the object and its shadow decreases (nostril). The right image has a Shadow Min Bias of 0.2. The dots are gone.

Depth map shadows do respect transparency. The hole here is due to a transparency map on a square prop. The shadow is a depth map shadow with a 256 map size.

It absolutely changes the uv mapping.