On Saturday, I received an e-mail from DAZ announcing a new product, HiRes 1.2, in their store. It's a mesh enhancer. It sounded great, so I purchased it. If you're thinking about buying it, don't do so until you read this. On the HiRes products page, DAZ proclaims, "The program comes with several sample models to get you started." Not really. It comes with six models, three of which are primitives. The features list proclaims, "Sample Models: 1. Poser Specific Models 2. Cr2 Conversion". There were no Poser specific models included with the product I bought; only a web page with links to some modified Posette files you could download. There is also no CR2 Conversion in this product that I can find anywhere. In the readme text reads that popped up after installation, the program instructs, "The Installers can be found in the "Hydratemplates" folder in the location you specified during the installation." A thorough search of my hard drive failed to unearth a folder called "Hydratemplates," or "Hydra" anything, for that matter. Since I can only import .OBJ files, I tried a couple of those to see if the program would work. Well, it did and it didn't. Each clothing item I imported gave me a message telling me "Model contains no normals." Strange, but I thought a product sold by a store dedicated to Poser would work flawlessly with Poser models. The final irony here is that I bought this product so that I could increase polygons on clothing, so character parts wouldn't show through. On each of the models I tested, not only did body parts show through when the clothes were morphed with the figure, but they were more prominent than they were before I converted the clothing with HiRes! Something is rotten in the state of Utah. Sad. Very sad.

When the model is subdivided it sometimes gets rounded off making it "smaller".

most 3d-modelling programs can do something like this.I tried it myself with some things, only the filesize gets bigger and in most cases ,no improvements. only a few props i modelled myself and made posable did better bendings .

having not purchased this item yet.. but i also have a question about it... that would probably bring up a good topic if proven to be true.. does it have something that "remembers" the original vertice location - so it leaves the texture template alone? i can see this as a BIG problem for people that have many textures for a simple prop or character... if you have to re-map the object that you run through this application, i dont see a whole lot of use for it.. especially for models like victoria or michael. does that make any sence?

if you are truly upset and not pleased with this item.. i would highly suggest you send an email to daz.. they are VERY good with customer support, and would (im fairly sure of) be generous in refunding your funds released for this item... the last thing they want is an unhappy customer with 25 dollars worth of dislike in their shopping history :)

Yep, most subdivision algorithms make the model smaller, so that it is pretty useless for Poser clothing. It might have some advantage for Poser props like vehicles or such, where it can create smoother surfaces. But usually the model has to be created with subdivision in mind to have a good effect. Poser 5 does subdivision at render time (the infamous polygon smoothing) and for most current Poser props this is not a good option. ;)

I did send a message to DAZ informing them of my displeasure. The cost of the product was not high, I'll grant you that; it's the fact that they were misleading in their advertising. Do that often enough and pretty soon people are paying hundreds for multiple products that won't work as promised. Not to mention the loss of reputation that occurs over time. Okay, DAZ didn't build this, they're brokering it. All the more reason to get the story straight. I didn't post here to grouse but to warn other people. Hopefully DAZ will make good one way or the other.

You can subdive models in Wings3d, an excellent free modeler. Just do a search.

Attached Link: http://www.renderosity.com/tutlink.ez?tutorialid=592

Hi, To increase the polygons number of a clothe and still use it to dress the figure, you need to put a value of 1 in the scaling factor after choose the surface curvature method. I put the link to the tutorial explaining it. Cheers Guy

~wonders why one cant use something free like Anim8tor to do a similar thing~

still.. my question would have to be... does it mess up the templates? :)

probably does mess up the templates... I'd expect that, really.

Nope, if done right subdivision doesn't mess up the templates. The old points and their UV coordinates are still there, new points get a new matching UV coordinate.

that's cool... question is does HiRes mess up the templates or not ;-)

Attached Link: http://www.meshtools3d.com/

OK, well I wrote the program, so I guess I better get involved :) Wampyr, I'm a simple email away, and I'm always around, so if something isn't doing what it should, or even what you think it should, just email me and I can straighten it out. It is after all, what product support is supposed to be about, but I can't offer support to people that won't contact me. 1) The mini/sample models included with the program are there to illustrate the effects of using subdivision techniques on them, and how HiRes accomplishes that. They weren't really intended to be some big set of feebee models. There will be more of these super-LoRes models released on the web-site, and these are intended to be for the use of people who are using HiRes. 1b) There IS a full cr2 on the web site. More than one even. There is a HiRes version of Posette, with all the standard CuriousLabs morphs converted to HiRes versions and supplied as MOR's. There is also a fairly detailed description of how to use them. There are also numerous additional morphs for the chest and head. The head morphs use the normal resolution Posette head, so they can be used by anyone using the Posette model, and not just people with HiRes. As such there is also a revised Head cr2 that will load these MOR's. Finally, there is a conversion of the Eve4 model that will also use the exact same MOR sets. These cr2's and MOR sets were created so that anyone having HiRes wouldn't have to go through all the conversions individually, and would have access to the HiRes versions in a quickly useable format. Other models beyond the original Posette model are underway pending some final authorizations. Lastly, in the light of trying to be supportive of the Poser community, I also provided cr2 variants that could be used by people who don't have HiRes, and hence the additional cr2's that make use of the MOR's and can be freely downloaded and used by anyone having Poser 4 models, and not just by people using the HiRes program. 2) The "HydraTemplates" comments in the DAZ readme are an error in the DAZ installer. I can guarantee that shouldn't be there, and I'm not sure what happened at DAZ to cause that. It is being fixed as we speak. All I can suggest is that from the amount of comments I have seen regarding Poser5 and the Hydra, they must be working on it furiously :) and it must have gotten mixed in somehow. Unfortunately, I didn't get a chance to do a final test on the DAZ release prior to it going 'live' but I have been in contact with them this morning and they are in the process of fixing it. 3) Typically, "Poser" models don't contain or need normals, but this has nothing to do with obj based models in general. The normals ARE needed for display purposes, and even Poser will create it's own before displaying the model. Since the HiRes program is not a Poser-only program, and is intended to work with other obj-based models (such as models dl'd from the internet,) the "No Normals" dialog is a simple informational tool to let you know the original model had none. It is not an error message, and does not stop the program from doing anything. Once you click OK it will simple create them for you. When you save/export it, you can either leave off the normals if you are exporting to Poser, or include normals if you are sending to a different program. 4) Shrinking models: Subdivision math will typically shrink a model slightly as it smooths it. This is also true of other smooth surface constructs such as bezier, b-splines, or basically anything that uses a convex-hull strategy. To address that situation (and specifically for the case of Poser Clothes) I "invented" the additional SurfaceCurvature method. This subdivision method leaves the original points of the model EXACTLY where the were, and creates new points based on the surface curvature surrounding the point. You can then fine tune the parameters to adjust the curvature in the final/subdivided model. See the link above by elsja/Guy He has made a VERY excellent tutorial on using the SurfaceCurvature method. thgeisel: I tend to disagree that subdividing doesn't provide noticeably better results. Have a look at the LoRes vs HiRes comparison in the HiRes Gallery of my site. I think the HiRes version provides a very noticeable difference in both smoothness and bending. For a rendering of the model here at Renderosity: http://www.renderosity.com/viewed.ez?galleryid=205747 Talon69: As MadYuri has mentioned, if subdividing is done properly, it won't mess up your texture layout :) HiRes does the subdivision by splitting the polygons in 3D space, but splits the texture coordinates in 2D space. This means your texture template will look exactly like it did on the low res model, except with all the extra polygons. Email me if you would like additional proof, and I can arrange to get you some matching HiRes versions for you to test. bijouchat: No, it doesn't mess up the texture templates :) And yes, a lot of high end software now comes with subdivision methods now that Pixar and PDI has made them popular, and even some of the low end/free ones such as anim8or and Blender. If you're using one of those then perhaps they do everything you need. If not though, then HiRes is an inexpensive and easy to use option, and one that does have some features that those other do not. For example, I can guarantee the SurfaceCurvature method is not available in other packages since it's my own invention. That is being expanded on, and there are also several additional new features in development that you won't likely see anywhere else. Hope that answers all the questions/comments? If not, please feel free to email me direct at dke@sk.sympatico.ca Bruce

sounds interesting, the surface curvature method is something I didn't understand before. :-) Thanks for your explanation, it has really let me know more about the product. :) Carrara tends to eat the texture templates when subdividing a vertex mesh, so that's where I have that experience from.