Back then I had an extensive purchased library of characters and props, many of which have no recent versions that I've found.  However, I am having severe problems with Firefly, as the attached render shows!

Note how the beam has bulged, and even encased the metal hook on the side.  The P4 renderer has actually done a pretty good job.  Unfortunately, for production reasons, I need to use Firefly.

This doesn't happen with all props - just some.

Any ideas would be appreciated.

I have logged a case with E-Frontier, but as their site doesn't even seem to have any P7 resources yet, I'm not hopeful.

Do you have 'smoothing' checked on in the Firefly render settings?

Smoothing will make many straight line props bulge.

You can also go into the object's properties box and turn off 'smoothing' as well for each prop in a scene

hmm...had a problem with that. Made a syringe, and in Poser 4 setting it rendered correctly, and in the fancy setting it came out as semi-spherical...go figure..;)

This is a continuing problem from P5 & P6. It seems to happen mainly with objects originally made in 3DS format and made by extruding from a shape.

It is a feature, not a bug. You must tick smoothing off on the propery form of the imported prop, otherwise sharp edges balloon in firefly.

Ahhh! The Goodyear Blimp Syndrome!  I was dumb founded by that myself.  As the others have said,  you need to uncheck "Smooth Polygons". I don't have Poser open, but I think you do that by selecting the item in the Pose window and using the parameter dial properties to turn it off for that item.  Then you can  still render in Firefly with "Smooth Polygons" checked, and the only item that it won't apply to is the ones where you have turned it off. 

there are a fw threads about this issue .

If you have a dial in object properties for smoothing angle or crease angle you can change the value to a lower number.

Selecting and unwelding the end polygons of a cylinder will also help.

"split vertices" will give you sharp edges as well, but slpitting ALL vertices is often overkill

Notice that there are check boxes for smoothing in both the render settings and object palette.  I make sure objects are saved with the proper smooth setting in the object palette, as P7 is fast enough for me to leave global smoothing turned on.

Int Poser 6 (I don't know about P7), I've got rid of this "feature" for specific props by switching to the "properties" tab of the Parameters dialogue and reducing the "Crease Angle" down to something like 20 degrees. The default is set too high IMHO. Turning smoothing off for an object doesn't alwayswork properly (at least, not for me - I'm probably doing something wrong) but changing the crease-angle sorted it for me, so I've never investigated fuirther..

Cheers,
Diolma

So smoothing is dependent on crease-angle?  I hadn't noticed that, I'd just assumed that crease angle only affected the shading while smoothing creates actual geometry at rendertime.  

There once was a 3D program called Tornado for the Amiga that let you set smoothing values.  You could make a sphere look like a blackberry by setting the smooth value to 150%.  I miss several things from that program.

"So smoothing is dependent on crease-angle?  I hadn't noticed that, I'd just assumed that crease angle only affected the shading while smoothing creates actual geometry at rendertime. "

AFAIK, yes.
Smoothing has (at least) 2 distinct and different meanings, according to the application you're using.

In 3D modelers, smoothing can apply a function to the mesh that adds vertices according to a formula. These apps (Wings, Blender. Hexagon etc.) are primarily concerned with creating new content; they are not so concerned with rendering the final result.

Other apps are more concerned with importing lots of externally created objects and assembling them into a scene, in varying ways and methods of manipulation.These include Vue, Bryce and Poser - they concentrate more on positioning and rendering, not original modeling.

Although the difference tends to blur, especially among some of the higher-level, out-of-my-price-range apps

But for Poser, it's fairly simple. Poser can import models (either from external models or from stuff included in the libraries) but has very limited mesh-modeling capabilities. Smoothing in Poser relates to the renderering, not to sub-division (ala Catmull-Clark et al).

A simple check as to whether crease-angle is smoothing dependent  in Poser is easy. In the properties tab for an object, uncheck the "Smooth Polys" checkbox. The crease-angle box greys out - no longer available. So Crease Angle requires smoothing enabled....

It doesn't add any vertices to the model - it's all render dependent...

I offer the above with some hesitation. I'm no expert. I still can't make any real sense of the "Crease-angle" in Poser, just that by setting it to 20-25 I tend to get better results...

Cheers,
Diolma

But unfortunately, Poser uses the term "smoothing" in the render settings panel to refer to subdivision.  Vertices actually are added at rendertime, so a sphere's edges will appear much more round with smoothing on than off.  It's something that's easy to overlook as you never see the added detail in wireframe.

Crease angle was a godesend when I was doing low poly "mecha" in Caligari on the Amiga.  I could set each individual piece's smoothing threshold.  The end result being that I could achieve apparently smooth pieces with low poly counts, and still have a few hard edges so as to avoid the "pillow effect".  (I think that's actually the correct term, BTW)

Hi Folks,

Firstly, sorry for the delay in responding here.  I got unexpectedly sent interstate on business, and have been offline for about three weeks.

I tried turning off smoothing, and it worked perfectly.

Thanks to everyone for their help.  It was just the solution I needed.

Ian/STGA.

mine too...kudos to you guys for the suggestion..