jagged polys ...
 

Hi all. I was hoping you could help me out with a problem I am having with my poly mesh. In the image below, I have circled two areas that, despite my best efforts, I just cannot smooth (for lack of better word). I have tweaked vertices, normals and edges without luck. If I do a poly smooth on it then the problem goes away but I've increased my overall poly count significantly.

http://home.earthlink.net/~maximus.b...g_problems.JPG

Here's the wire mesh ...

http://home.earthlink.net/~maximus.b...blems_mesh.JPG

Any help would be appreciated and I apologize in advance for the noobish question. Thanks all.

the top one is a non planar face, split it and it should be fine. The onther one is cause you have a whole bunch of edges where you dont need half that many. Reduce them and you should be rockin'

Thanks Pure_Morning. I'll give it a shot when I get home and post status later. Appreciate the follow up.

Ok. I cleaned up some of the edges which helped in the lower area. For the upper area, I guess I am still unclear what to do as far as splitting the face. When I split it in half, one half appears to look okay. Not sure where to go from there. I tried deleting the face and then extruding/merging the edges. That appeared to make it worse... face turned black???

Here is the updated poly mesh with the edges removed.
http://home.earthlink.net/~maximus.b..._poly_mesh.JPG

This is what it looks like w/out the wireframe.
http://home.earthlink.net/~maximus.b...sh_pre_avg.JPG

This is what it looks like after the normals are averaged. It appears to have fix the nonplanar face. However, black spots now appear on the side. This doesn't really surprise but now I am unsure how to approach this issue. :confused: :o
http://home.earthlink.net/~maximus.b...h_post_avg.JPG

ok it's a non planar face, if you split it into a pair of triangles then it cannont be non planar face anymore (3 verts will always make a planar face). Seems like some of your geometry might be a bit of a mess. look for non planar quads on your mesh.
Alan

It looks to me like you have a few n-sides polies aswell in that area. That should be the first thing taken care of...

Thanks to all for the responses to date. Here are some profile shots which may (or not?) provide more insight into geometry, n-sided, etc.

http://home.earthlink.net/~maximus.b..._profile_1.JPG

http://home.earthlink.net/~maximus.b..._profile_2.JPG

Re: the darkened areas... if I split the quads into triangles then the dark areas do go away.

http://home.earthlink.net/~maximus.b...it_quads_1.JPG
http://home.earthlink.net/~maximus.b...it_quads_2.JPG

lol yes that's cause they have more than four sides and are not planar. Try running polygons>> cleanup and see what happens.

Alan