Using displacement maps is another kettle of fish altogether. There are times when you need to unweld points, such as on a length of pipe that has flanges and bevels all along it, otherwise you don't get the sharp creases where you need them.

Quote - Sue88 in the Maya forum also advised me to bevel the end loop and It somehow solved it. My brain couldn't process all of the data you guys have presented but I do I agree that this should somehow be reported to SM.

Its just a simple cylinder. Poser should have imported this with no problem at all.

That cylinder is not broken. This image shows the unmodified cylinder on the left and my modified version on the right. All I did was cut the top and bottom polygons and paste them back into place. Because the vertices are now unwelded, it renders fine.

I model hard edged objects, so dynamic clothing is of no concern to me at all, but if you're worried about unwelded points you can weld them all and simply set smoothing angles in UV mapping software, on a surface by surface basis. It works nicely. Sometimes though, you simply have to have some unwelded points.

Quote - Its NOT a bug.. you need to model FOR POSER, not for your modelling application.

No, it certainly isn't a bug. I was wondering if anyone was going to actually read your post and take any notice of it.

This has been made far more complicated than it actually is. N-gons like those end caps MIGHT render properly in Poser, but do you really want to take the chance? The old LightWave technique that I use,  and which should be able to be applied in any half decent modeller, is to cut those end cap polys out, kill the polygons but leave the points that made up the polys, in place. You then select the points one by one and create all 4 point polys, except for the top and bottom polys, which will contain 3 points. You then paste these polys back as the end caps and Poser won't be able to mess the cylinder up, because the end cap polys are now detached from the cylinder body.
If you want to merge all the points, then all you have to do is set an appropriate smoothing angle either in your modeller or in your UV mapping software. There is no technical need for adding small bevels or using any other work arounds, except of course that bevelled edges always look better.

Quote - Speaking of semantics, i.e. the meaning of words, what does that last statement mean?

"This is not a Poser render kids. Don't try this at home."

Does that mean you think it is not possible to render like that in Poser? Or you want to know how to render like that in Poser? Or does it mean you think I'm not 48 years old? LOL

Or did it mean something else?

Obviously my attempt at humour was lost on you. Never mind.
It seems I've committed the mortal sin of daring to pose a question in response to your original post and that you've taken that as some sort of challenge. As far as your age goes, I don't know how that's relevant, but anyway.....

My image took a matter of seconds to set up and uses no lights, no images, no nodes, no surfacing tricks, just a background colour.  Your image is not bad, but no cigar. You'll have to turn on Poser's radiosity to do better. Yeah, try this at home kids.

You can keep having the argument, semantic or otherwise, as long as you want, but I've spent too much time with this already, so will bid this place good-bye and go and enjoy my long weekend in the perfectly rendered real world.

Well, I'll formulate a reply to that tomorrow. It's far too late here to start discussions like that. Stay tuned.

This is not a Poser render kids. Don't try this at home.

I wasn't referring to your post. But yes, a little colour somewhere is usually a good thing.

Err, right.

That's a nice technique bagginsbill but it sorts of negates the point of introducing some colour warmth or otherwise into a shot, to get away from the pure white CG lighting look, don't you think?

Not to be rude or anything, but that object is a mess. I'm assuming you created the window with a boolean operation, rather than slicing the mesh up and then bevelling the relevant section. Boolean operations should be avoided wherever possible when modelling for Poser. You've got triangles going in all directions and there are way too many polys for a simple wall. I'd start again quite frankly. It would probably be quicker that trying to fix what you have there.

I've never had to set the bias anywhere near 4, but there you go, at least it's sorted.
You would think, wouldn't you, that after all these years the software would be sorted and bugs like this would have been squashed.

Bugger. That is all a bit strange. I can only suggest going the other way with Shadow Min Bias and seeing what happens. Very odd.

Edit: There you go, my suggestion worked even before I posted it :)

Try lowering the value of Shadow Min Bias of your light to about 0.2 and see how you go.
And 7 ray trace bounces is way too many. For a scene like this, 2 is plenty.
Actually, for a scene where you're not tracing reflection or refraction, it won't make any difference.

Quote - Always keep your texture maps in the sizes 256x256, 512x512, 1024x1024 or 2048x2048. Larger than this they take up too many resources, and these sizes, by the way a computer calculates, render and place less of a strain on resources than odd sizes like 2000x2000 or sizes that are not square like 2000x1000. 

The only place I have ever seen this theory is here in the Poser forum. I have never come across this idea anywhere else, in all my years of doing 3D. By keeping texture sizes to a power of 2, you're placing artificial restrictions on yourself, and could actually be wasting memory by using textures that are too big. 

Quote - if they render it correctly, most of their users won't be able to duplicate said
render, thus forcing them to render using default settings.

Sorry, but that's nonsense. Nobody is forced to render product promos using default Poser lighting. If we did that, we'd never sell anything. I suspect the main reason that so many promo renders look less than stellar is that people just don't take the time to learn how to light a shot properly. It's not that hard, providing you can be bothered.