I have a mesh which is just fine, except that it renders with a lot of litle dots in P5 firefly (with toon nodes). My guess is that it is because it is made of triangles and not quads (hence the dotted lines following the movement of the dress). If my memory doesn't fail me, I recall having heard of an application that can transform triangle based meshes into quads based. (could it be UV mapper pro?) Thanks in advance to anyone that can help me on this problem. compiler

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I don't know about UVMapper Pro, but LithUnwrap and Ultimate Unwrap3D have such a feature. It's fairly limited with LithUnwrap, though (you can only convert two selected triangles at a time, and they must be both adjacent and coplanar).

Anthony Appleyard has a utility in Free Stuff that you might find useful.

I've had problems with those Toon shader dots, also. Do you really think triangles are the cause?

Wings will do it for you. I don't know if that is the problem.

Thanks for your answers. I'll try this. I don't know if it's the triangles, but it has definitely something to do with the mesh : on the pic above, I superimposed the render and the mesh as seen in Poser workspace, and the black spots always appear on a specific part of the mesh. I'm using MayaX render control light set. I've tried turning the shadows on and off, and I've tried the "displacement map" trick. None worked. May be it's something about welding vertices ? If anyone has an idea or knows a modelling guru, I'd be glad for your help.

Aha. I was wondering when someone was going to model that costume. What figure base are you using? IM me if you don't want to admit to being a closet "Moonie."

Well, I've tried the Detriang utility by Anthony Appleyard and it gave promising results : the dots have faded by half (bottom half of the pic), and I find the result quite acceptable. I've tried to transform the triangles in Cinema 4D (I couldn't make Wings work on my computer), the transformation was all right, but it screwed the materials. I'm quite sure that the problem is the triangles : look at the glove on the bottom part of the pic : it has exactly the same toon node as the dress, but it doesn't give any dots. I'll try another setting for detriang. nomuse : this is an outfit made for anime doll by MayaX (in the MP), it is modeled by insomniaworks (who also have done a fetish faerie outfit, in the MP too) and I'm testing this senshi dress at the moment. The package is perfect, and the dress conforms like a charm. It renders perfectly in Poser 4 and with Firefly without the toon nodes. The only problem is with the toon nodes, and only in close up images. I don't understand what you mean by closet "Moonie" (english is not my native language), but I don't see why I would not admit liking anime, manga and the like.

Looks like a good model...skirt looks very flowing, bows nicely detailed and properly proportional. I've always thought the Anime Doll would be a good figure for all those amusing anime outfits. I am following with interest to see what you learn about the "quads vs tri's" controversy. I've opened up several clothing meshes for inspection and I find equal numbers using one or other -- and in most of my render experiments they have rendered equally as well.

I don't understand what you mean by closet "Moonie" ....

A reference to Sailor Moon, I'd assume, given the costume.

You're right, compiler; it has something to do with the triangles. I ran one of Don's shirts through MilkShape to triangulate it, then did a side-by-side comparison of it and the regular shirt, after applying the Toon shaders to both. The triangulated version was dotted.

Something else to fix in Service Release 4, I suppose.

Attached Link: http://compiler.free.fr/essais/venusDT.jpg

Ah ! Much better ! I've used the detriangulate utility on the original file, but this time setting the minimum angle at 20 (instead of the default 5), increasing the value beyond 20 doesn't give better results. Now I think the result is good (see link : for some reason, I could not post a new image in this thread...) Thanks a lot Little Dragon for pointing me to this wonderful freebee. nomuse : the rendering problem apparently occurs mainly with poser5's toon nodes. I remember having read that Poser4 also has issues with triangles, but I cannot remember which. I haven't had any problem in renderings triangles until this one. Thanks for your help. compiler