Here's the original mesh, in Wings 3d. To create detail in Poser, I made the edges hard where detail was needed, beveled the 'sharp' edges by .02, and finally loop cut the puppy so that I could have more than one material to UVMap it.

The object was imported into Poser with no changes in settings. I tried 'weld identical vertices', but no difference there.

What you probably need to do is go to the properties tab on the prop and turn off smooth polys on that end.

Then it should render fine, even with smooth polys turned on in render settings.

That's generally my first step when props balloon out when rendering in Poser....and if that doesn't take care of things....uh...not sure after that atm.

good ta know. I'll try it. I tried to get all the smoothing done in Wings anyways..;)

You can turn off polygon smoothing within the PP2 itself.  

Just find the lines that go

smoothPolys 1

and make them all

smoothPolys 0

Then you won't have to worry about the render setting ever
again, and you won't have to add anything to the readme 
to prevent other folks from asking you why the prop has
an aneurysm when rendered!

at the ends where the balloning occurs I wonder if you have a polygon inside the cylinder ?

If you have either remove it or unweld it.

These are syptoms of the smoothing used and is worse in firefly.

In poser 6 and up you have a dial for crease angle , that controls the amount of smoothing that occurs .

hmmm. I have to get it from .obj to .pp2 before I could do that. Haven't tried actually making a real prop yet, but it's probably time.

The whole thing is just extrudes and smoothing in wings. I don't think there's polys inside, but I haven't looked. I've got Poser 5, so if it works there, I'm happy.

thanks for the help. I'll see what I can do..

Holy buckets!..smooth polygons...how deceptively simple! I take back everything I said about you guys..;) j/k...but thanks.