Smoothing polygons & Render
 

Hello all,

A 'hopefully' quick basic newbie question for you.

I have built a flat screen monitor in Maya using simple cube polygons. It looks like a monitor, even if it isnt particually good!

I have set the monitor to lean at an angle, but for some reason the edge of it now looks as though it has a jagged edge, almost like an old PC game model.

When I render it, even at high levels it still shows this jagged edge, although in reality it is one edge, not broken by verts at any point.

I tried smoothing, but as it is a rectangle it came out too 'blobby' and I needed it to look like straight edges.

Does anyone know a quick "click on xxx" button that might make it look more like a real object when it renders, rather than like a 2nd rate 3d model? I presume I need to up the resoultion or something.. but I am only a beginner and none of my books have explained how to stop it from happening.

Thank you in advance

Pall

See if there are any unnecessary verts hiding there and delete them, or post up a screen shot with wireframe and shaded

Sorry I am at work at the moment and can not post one at the moment, I will try later when I'm home.

Let me try to explain this a little better. Imagine you make a polygon cube, then you do nothing except rotate it slightly so its showing at an angle. Now, the edge, which was rotated now shows the little jagged line you get when you display any low res object at an angle on a PC.

Now I presumed if I rendered this the little jagged edge would be smoothed out at a higher res, but it still shows, which makes the rendered image look like an old PC game object. There's definatly no hidden verts or anything on it..

I think its just me not understanding either the renderer correctly, or not having refined the model somehow. But the guy in my book goes from make the model, to "now render it and voila!" but misses the cruicial "how to render it and make the "its a model" effect go away"!

Does this make more sense? I'll try and post something later to show you if I can't figure it out.

Thanks for the response btw, you guys are so helpful to us newbies! :D

I'm not sure but in your render global setting make sure anti aliasing is turned on this could help.

Ahh.. ok, I'll check that. Thank you !

Hi, I'm now home, checked for Antialiasing and it was all on.

This is a very small example of what I mean. I would post the whole image but it is so bad compared to what you guys can do that I will wait until I am happy with it!!

Anyway.. this is a corner of the monitor, no textures except the default and as you can see its all torn.

http://www.underground101.com/maya/example.jpg

Any ideas how this can be smoothed out, its just a simple cube, resized to shape.

Thank you.

this is weird
have u tried creatin a new cube an rotating it (in the same scene) and does this happen to the new cube
just some info some i can understand better

thx

Everything in the scene does it, with the exception of a can i made using a Curve line and Revolve. Anything with a straight edge that has been angled.

I presumed I had just not set "smooth lines when rendering" or something, as the wireframe and shaded viewports show the same thing...

I know its something simple, I'm too new to this to have done something complicated, even by mistake lol.

For example, new scene, make a cube, resize and rotate it..

http://www.underground101.com/maya/test.jpg

try exporting your scene into a new scene and see if its the same

just to make sure all the bases are covered, try changing your quality setting under anti-aliasing to production quality (from preview quality). that should enable your multi-pixel filtering as well, and give it a high quality setting.

Yes I have tried that, it looks no different. it looks just like that on the model in the camera window too.. there isnt a resolution setting somewhere I need to up in the whole of Maya is there?

no... but i think the culprit still lies in your render globals settings... could you give us a screenshot of both common and maya software settings?

did you try beveling the edges?

select or shift select the edges you want too look smoother, > Edit Polygon > bevel > choose a distance and how many segments you want to aadd into the edge, maybe go with t a 3 segment and estimate the distance (undo if not right distance) till you get it right where you want. try rendering it and see if it works.

have u tried deleting ur preferences folder u may have changed some thing by accident