Newbie question - smooth curves between SketchUp and Poser/DAZ Studio

Sempie

I've come across the free version of SketchUp and a free obj converter, and as SketchUp thus far
is the only modeling software I came across that is intuitive enough for me to enjoy, I am thinking
about using it to create some basic (freebie) props for Poser and Studio.

Therefore I will be asking some basic, maybe rather stupid, newbie questions about the process
of modeling in SketchUp for use in Poser/Studio.

Question 1 would be about smooth curves.

My first attempt at a model is a basic Tupperware bowl.

In SketchUp itself almost anything looks smooth; once exported, things look quite differently.
For this bowl, I needed to go to an extreme high resolution to make the surface appear smooth.

In SketchUp, that meant setting both the curve tool and the circle tool that I use as the base for
rotating the contour to several hunderds of sides, resulting in humungus amounts of polygons
and SketchUp almost choking on me, making it calculate for almost two hours to complete
the mesh.

The first render shows two meshes; the pink one on the left with the ridiculous amount of polygons,
and to the right a lower resolution model that looks chunky despite the smoothing switched
on. (3Delight at its highest resolution, Ueberenvironment 2)

The picture beneath it shows the meshes in wireframe mode.

The third picture shows a Poser 4 render with the lowrez model actually looking rather smooth.
(rendered using the DAZ True Global lighting preset) This is basically the look I had in mind
when modeling the prop - but no such luck using Poser 7 Firefly or DS4 3Delight.

Should I learn to live with these high polygon counts, or is there a way around this?
Is this just between SketchUp and Poser/Studio, or is this a generic problem?

Takeo.Kensei

I'm not quite sure to understand but I guess you imported a model from sketchup to DS and want to know how to smooth it when rendering?

Try this :

Go to scene tab and select your bowl then click on the scene tab option then Edit->convert to subD
Go to the parameter tab then on your Bowl if it's not already selected then go to Mesh resolution. There you can adjust the subdivision of the mesh. The more subdivided, the more smoothed it will look but don't go too far too. The limit by default is 2 but you can edit the limit

I don't know for poser but there should be some options for subdivision too like any other 3D program

Jaderail

I think they are more interested in how to model the items smooth to start with. You could load your model into Hexagon after the conversion and smooth it in Hex and Subdivide it if need be. It should handle the job better than SketchUp.

That's all I can think of.

Sempie

Jaderail said:

I think they are more interested in how to model the items smooth to start with. You could load your model into Hexagon after the conversion and smooth it in Hex and Subdivide it if need be. It should handle the job better than SketchUp.

That's all I can think of.

You are right; I'd like to use SketchUp as a modeling program to create simple props for Poser/Studio that will work
without any extra tweaking. I did not download this Tupperware box from the Trimble Warehouse as there are no
tupperware boxes to be found - I modeled it myself, (oh, well, big deal, it's quite basic) and as of yet, the only residing
place of this mesh is my own private hard disk. Before distributing it as a freebie, I'd like to improve on the model.

As Hexagon is free I have it somewhere on my hard disk, but I have never really used the program. Will need to check
how to use it for smoothing out my meshes. My main goal would still be to keep the meshes as light as possible while
still looking good, without the need of a lot of fiddling within Poser or Studio before rendering.

What I originally liked about the earlier installments of Poser was the ease of use - even if I'm happy that there's now
a lot more options to tweak around with shaders, smoothing, lighting etc, I still like to be able to use stuff 'out of the box'
with ready to use models, preset light sets, shader presets, etc.

Being a professional 3D character animator I've seen professional modelers, riggers, texturers, shaders and set lighters
at work in Maya, and even if the end result is usually spectacular, the amount of tweaking to get things right is a bit too
much for a hobbyist program like Studio. Sometimes it's just great to simply push a button and getting a decent render
without the need to fiddle around for several days.

And that's the sort of Freebies I'd like to create - the sort that works straightaway.