Gull Wing poly artifacts
nightwolf1982
Posts: 1,166
I just bought lwanmtr's Gull Wing item (the Delorean model), and when i loaded it in DS, there were all these black triangles on the car. I know this has something to do with smoothing, but I don't know how to fix this in DAZ.
The car looks fine in Poser.
Can anyone help me out?
Artifacting.jpg
800 x 452 - 73K
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Comments
Have you checked, in a 3d modeling program, if the normals are correct?
Try altering the Smoothing Angle at the bottom of the Surfaces pane with the object selected. If it works OK in Poser, that may well be the problem.
Yeah, that's what I couldn't think of last night...
But for $36 it shouldn't be doing that...I've got free car models that import nicer than that (that's the exception...lots of the free ones import EXACTLY like that and require a ton of tweaking/fixing...but hey, they are free).
Problem is, that's a very old model built for Poser, and I think a version of Poser before mesh smoothing was built in. (The D|S smoothing function works differently and D|S can't read the smoothing settings from a more modern Poser file.) If it is a normals-backwards problem, then that's something else D|S can't pick up from a Poser model — and it's much less of a problem in Poser anyway. You can pretty much expect to need a bit of tweaking of one sort or another (or two or three sorts...) when you load a Poser file of that vintage into a recent version of D|S, there have been just so many changes over the years. Many things that weren't a problem five or ten years ago now cause various hiccups and glitches.
It's hard to tell without a close up of one them in wire texture shaded mode, but it could also be the infamous "Black Poly", DS has never been able to cope with "badly done" quads & n-gons, it gets it's internal triangulation wrong on them which breaks the normals, turning the poly black.
It shouldn't matter if it was 'for Poser' or not...an OBJ file that has those problems is poorly done...and for $36 should be fixed. Like I said, with freebies I expect those types of problems, but not on paid meshes.
If it was originally a Lightwave mesh and converted to OBJ, then that's were the problem is...a poor conversion to obj. If it's n'gons they should have been fixed at the time of conversion. If it's flipped normals...they should have been reoriented. And so on (duplicate vertices, Boolean artefacts, etc)...
I've converted a lot of the free car meshes around and those are the kind of things that need to be done after every format conversion...so I expect to do it when dealing with a freebie, but on a paid for item, I don't expect it.
Did anybody find a solution for this?
I have the same problem, but changing the smoothing angle seems not to help.
Any hint is wellcome.
Take it in to a modelling app...
With it selected in the scene tab, go "Edit > Object > Geometry" and select triangulate, that will either crash DS or turn all of the quad & n-gons in the mesh into Tri-poly, which should hopefully "fix" the issue.
@ mjc1016, you sound like DAZ when we first started reporting the Black Poly issue with DS2, they blamed it on "poor" model making etc. until you point out that their Gen 2 figures and content also have them, mostly the gen 2 kids, finally late in DS3 they gave us the triangulate feature to get around it. They've gone one stage better with DS4.5, now it triangulates any "bad" poly on load, but it's not perfect as there are still a few that slip through, usually quads that look like tri and that have two vertice close together.
That does the trick, thanks a lot!
You mean...gah....that's actually in there...*thump*...*thump* <head hitting desk>...*crash* ...and I've been doing it the 'hard' way all this time...
Seriously, I never realized there was a triangulate function built in. I've been correcting them by doing it in mostly Blender...sometimes, even by hand one or two polys at a time. There's so many features that would be more 'known' with more complete documentation...well, maybe, considering how some major features are just glossed over.
The Hex manual is very useful I think, it is not up to date, but the information is usually there.
Thanks for all the responses everyone!
Bejaymac - triangulate worked perfectly! Many thanks!!
Had this model for some time and was glad to find this. However, the triangulate option doesn't seem to work for me... Daz Studio just freezes up when it is attempted, every single time.
Any other ideas? It's a relatively good model with the right lighting, but it's just a shame it has those black polygons.
Hi,
I tested this with the current version of DS and it still works for me. How long did you wait? On my old PC it tooks nearly 4 minutes until it was finished.
Ack! It does work!
Thing is, it really was giving the the typical frozen 'is not responding' message and genuinely seemed to have crashed for about two or three minutes. Was on the verge of forcing it to close the application, again, but then Daz seemed to just kind of right itself and give me the polished result. Did the same thing when I repeated it: Appears to crash, then reverses course. Bizarre...
Anyway, a big retrospective thank you to all the above people! Thought I'd wasted the money and had been despairing. :)
Depending on computer specs and size of the model, it can take quite a bit of time...and yes, often times while Studio is off 'thinking' the OS thinks it has frozen or something.
I get 'Not Responding' errors from Win 7 quite a lot, and they are entirely bogus. It can happen with DIM, and even Carrara sometimes, I used to believe them, and kill the process, but not any more, I just wait for a while.
Generally "Not Responding" is Windows way of saying "the programs bloody busy, so stop clicking buttons", it will normally clear after 5 - 10 minutes depending on your system, if it's still like that after 20 minutes then it's safe to say it's hung and you will need to force kill it.