> >I don't. I find they scream 'bad 3D' and detract from an otherwise impressive
> >texture and lighting setup. In fact, it is so impressive I would really like
to
> >see a version with the normals corrected.
>
> The quotes around bad 3D are so necessary - since it's all very
> subjective.

Yep, subjective indeed. For example if it were me, and I chose to
keep the lines as I put it to canvas, I would likely choose to make
that forward knee considerably more subtle. It's the thing bugging
me the most.

But then, Boris Vallejo is my favorite artist, I think
Van Gogh was suffering from astigmatism, and I'm convinced Picasso
was just a lucky pretender. So what do I know? :)


>
> As for correcting the normals, I wouldn't know where to begin any
> ideas? It's, remember, a mesh2 generated by OBJuvPOV.

Several things come to mind. A combination of things may be required.
I haven't used OBJuvPOV, but if it has an option to increase the
smoothing angle of the normals that would be the first thing to try.
That seems to be the most obvious problem, around the arms. 3Dwin and
Crossroads both support this option. But I think only 3Dwin can deal
with the uv coords.

For that knee, you would almost have to pull it into a modeller and
manually tweak the points, into a smoother position. Same for the far
hip, but it could ride as is the shadows. Anim8or, for example, is free
and supports the .obj format. Point selection can be tedious but zooming
in and learning the virtual trackball helps a bunch. If you do this
you might want to save the uv coords as a separate file and re-apply them later.
UVMapper can assist with this.

As Gilles pointed out some of this may be due to the way POV renders
meshes, particularly at glancing angles. Double illuminate could help
a little, but I saw a post here some months ago suggesting that a second
copy of the mesh translated ever so slightly behind the first ( say .00001
or something like that) can also help overcome those artifacts.


> >The composition is oddly interesting as well. Why headless?
>
> The headlessness corresponds to the hand jesture towards the viewer -
> as if she is asking 'why' or even 'where'.

Ok. I see 'where' more than 'why', but I see it now. Thanks.

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