depends on which version of poser you're modelling for. Poser4 wants to make everything roundy and smooth, P6 allows you to decide what gets smoothed. splitting will result in extra verts but on a simple model that's no problem. The best looking solution requires more work (and more polygons). In real life (on things like furniture) there are no perfectly sharp edges, all corners have a small radius which catches the light. If you place additional edges on your table surfaces near the corners Poser will round them but the rounding will be limited to the very edges. Hmmm... too difficult to explain - I'll do a picture soon.

"JB's figures are always near-faultless...they just tend to end up challenged in the clothing area. " Well the 'Wardrobe Whizzer' will fix that problem I would think.

Ok, my mistake, I didn't realise she's been around for a while. The first time I saw her was in today's newsletter. So I remain puzzled as to why there was a rush to get renda out 'on time'. On time for what? I seriously wonder if Renda will ever be 'oficially' remapped as she clearly needs to be. The alternative is that a few merchants come up with their own versions of "Renda Remapped" but this will mean users will have to make a choice as to which remapped version they adopt as standard, it'll dilute the variety of available textures if there are different favorite mappings. It needs to be done at source and it needs to be done a week ago.

Reposting this here from a different thread: Just for the heck of it I ran a little test to see exactly(ish) how resource-hungry Renda is compared to V3. (can you tell I'm avoiding work?) Loaded Renda loaded 4000wide head map loaded 4000high body map loaded 4000wide head bump map loaded 4000high body bump map loaded 4000high trans map Hit render button, Renda eats 400 megs of memory before render will begin. Deleted Renda Loaded V3 loaded 4000wide head map loaded 4000high body map loaded 4000wide head bump map loaded 4000high body bump map loaded 1500sq teeth map loaded 600 sq eye map loaded 1300 sq trans map Hit render button, V3 eats 320 megs of memory before render will begin. Who'd a thunk it eh?

"...so talking to me like I'm a five year old will not offend me at all" As stahlrattepoints out, this is a complicated task, even when you know exactly how it's supposed to work. Lots can go wrong and it can be terribly frustrating. And then there are issues of morphs and maps etc. So the answer, in 5 year old terms, is "wait until you're older" ;-)

Well before I delete her I'll certainly give the glamorous J pack a try. Good thinking glueing all her toes back together again, a zillion separate toe segments was truly daft.

Aha!, Thanks.

There seem to be quite a few people who like her enough to be putting lots of work into add-ons for her. I figured the only contribution I could make to improving her looks would be to make a boiler-suit and some wellies for her, and maybe a welder's helmet ;-)

I have to admit that when I discovered this marvellous little world that is Poser, I was quite stunned that so many people seemed content to buy props, clothes, textures, light packs, poses etc and 'just' put them together. I used to build plastic scale models as a kid, mostly from kits but often "scratchbuilt" using plastic card, wire, balsa etc from photos and drawings. And this 'pre-made' poser thing seemed like the equivalent of buying an expensive kit ready-painted and almost finished. It seemed like a dumb hobby. It's not that I felt it had less merit from a creative point of view, I just really couldn't see the point of it. I thought that if one is doing this for fun, then why pay out (more) money so you can skip over a big part of the fun of doing all the base stuff yourself too. So, not wanting to miss out on any fun, I learned how to do just about every aspect from scratch, pouring an utterly absurd amount of time into it, and I wised up a lot in the process. I certainly came to apreciate the work in the products in the marketplace! I learned that it isn't worth trying to master everything, there just isn't time in life. Have a go by all means, get the basic idea, but then focus on the aspects that you enjoy most and put your time into those. My thing is modelling, poser is a vehicle for that, and finished renders are a spin-off of that. I've produced very, very few finished "art" renders, the pictures I make seem to be nice test pics of my models, but I'm happy. But if my primary aim was to produce lots of finished pictures, learning modelling and mapping would be a pretty daft and circuitous way to go about it. Ob

I accidentally made some pretty funky camo while getting my nodes in a tangle in the P6 material room (I think I was trying to make floortiles or fur or something sigh) :o) If you don't come right with the ajax link, let me know and I'll see if I can help. Ob

It's also useful if you want to use different render settings on different areas of an image. For example you might find that certain (faster) settings look good enough for the whole image except one figure's hair which comes out blurry. You can do a second render of just the bit around that figure's head using the area render feature at much higher (slower)settings. Save both out and stick 'em together in P-shop, still quicker than waiting for a slow render of the whole scene.

Might be your drivers, I have a side button set up for double-click and it works in P6. As much as I love Poser (and I do), I loathe almost everything about the interface. I'm sure it's just peachy for someone who has two figures, three outfits and only plays with Poser once a month, but if you use it more than that it's as though every single feature of the pretty interface is a frustrating obstacle in your workflow. I was really hoping that P6 would be a big improvement on P4 in the interface department but in some ways it's worse, navigating around the runtime is a good example. Hmmm... I'd better stop now before I enter full rant mode (and before someone gives me the "well what do you expect at this price" speech) ;o) Ob

I was pretty sure it was a smoothing issue - the help files call it 'balooning'. But that shouldn't be limited to a raytraced render, I think it would happen anyway. If this problem only kicks in when raytracing kicks in perhaps there's a displacement map causing it?

Wow! Very interesting indeed! Thank you iikuuk for posting this, and thank you Ajax for the illuminating commentary. I re-created this network just to see if I could get my head around what it is actually doing (alas, my head doesn't seem to stretch that far). That was before Ajax posted the explanation which helps a great deal. There's something truly exciting about feeling way out of one's depth but at the same time hungry to learn. I felt that way about 3D modelling, then about mapping and rendering, then figure creation, and now about this stuff. And the learning is made so much easier by people like you who share your mastery so generously here on the internet - "the university of the third age". Thank you Ob

Did you try Menu>Render>Reload Textures ? I was making changes to a tex the other day (and re-saving as the same filename) and each time I hit "reload textures" I could see as my tex updated in the preview. It seems to override "Keep textures loaded", forcing a reload anyway, but maybe it's better to have "keep textures loaded" un-checked while working on the texture.