Sorry if this has been asked many times before, but if so, the answer should be pretty well known.  As you can see in this picture, the shading on the model, after brought into Poser, is not what I would have wanted. You can see where things are not appearing right, with lighter and darker areas where they don't belong.

What's the best way to get rid of this? Should I split a few polygons in the model, try making smoothing groups, or what? I don't really want there to be a hard edge anywhere, I just want the patches of light and dark to go away.

Or maybe I could just hide it with a really busy texture map... :sneaky:

Thanks for your help!

What program did you use to make it? There might be people with the technical know-how in another forum dedicated to that modelling app.

From my experience I recognise it as a polygon/face alignment issue, but not much more than that!

Best of luck.

I modeled this in Hexagon, and in that program it looks fine. I figured it was a Poser issue in its display... All the normals are where they should be. This is supposed to be a soft edge. I used the "fillet" tool on it.

Amacord, this is the way it is presently, I'm not sure if this is what you meant or not.

btw, if you take a closer look at BrianRs dress in this thread (http://www.renderosity.com/mod/forumpro/showthread.php?thread_id=2666995) you will see that his dress suffers the very same problem, only at a much smaller scale. you could try to reduce the thickness of your rims. imho they are a bit too thick in any way, dont you agree?

Amacord, thanks for the second picture. I think that gives a better look at what you are talking about. That might be the answer. I will give that a try.

You're right, the rims are too thick, I guess. Unfortunately, that will require quite a bit of back-tracking to fix, but it is probably worth doing. Oh well, back to the old drawing board!

Well, that trick with making a thin row of polygons worked out quite well. Thank you, Amacord! But now, I've got a new and very bizarre artifact, as seen in this picture.

It seems that the shadow that would be cast by the front of the shirt onto, well, the inside back of the shirt is instead being cast onto the front of the shirt itself!! All the normals are pointed the right way.

I don't know, I'm stumped. I've never seen this before. Any ideas??

no ideas...sorry. pls upload that thing somewhere for me to take a closer look.

It was the strangest thing! That weird shadow was appearing there, but I tried a few things:

1. Increasing the shadow map size made it increasingly less noticable.
2. It disappeared when using the Poser 4 renderer.
3. Even with a small shadow map and the Firefly renderer, it did not appear at all if I put a figure "inside" it, which is the way it is supposed to be, of course.

So my mysterious problem is not really so much of a problem, but it still is mysterious. I think I've reached the "don't mess with it further" point. Now comes the fun part: making the cute texture map! :biggrin:

Thanks for all the help!

You can also try to use ray-traced shadows instead of shadowmaps.

-How can you improve things when you don't make mistakes?

Bopper, an interesting and effective idea. I had not thought of ray traced shadows before you mentioned it.

Of course, I shouldn't really NEED to do any of those things... That's okay, though, since putting a figure in there does the trick. I'm not going to be rendering any "ghost shirts"! :laugh:

Still not sure why it happened, but I guess that's going to remain an unsolved mystery.