More smoothing problems
 

I have a poly model that I need to smooth shade. I've tried averaging the normals, and softening them, but I cannot get a clean smooth shade.

Any thoughts?

:banghead:

http://www.freshlettuce.net/~tarmy/DinoPoly_01.zip

If you're only smoothing a few faces, you can use this process:

1) select the faces you want to smooth.
2) Choose Edit Polygons>Extract. DO NOT move any faces. Extract takes each face you selected and makes it a single object.
3) select all the faces you just extracted and choose Polygon>Combine.
4) select all vertices on the new object and choose Edit Polygons>Merge Vertices options box. Set the value to .01 and click "MergeVertex."
5) Select the object and choose Polygons>Smooth.
Select the object again, then select your original model and choose Polygons>Combine.
6) Select all vertices and choose EditPolygons>MergeVertices again.
7) Your done.

When choosing faces to smooth, you don't want them to have many jagged edges anywhere. You may have to do this process on a section of faces, then another seperate section of faces, then combine them to get the correct effect. This process might not work if your mesh is not at least somewhat smooth already. I would recomend saving before you do all this, then if you don't like the results simly reload the file. I used this method for the smoothing of my helicopter in the 3D challenge competition and it worked out pretty well.

Wow dark you showed me something heheh=)

Sorry, I cannot download your zip file. I have Maya 4.0 Complete.

Kurt: Glad you learned something new. I came across this new way of smoothing to avoid those black streaks you get sometimes when you smooth. I knew that if I smoothed a certain section of the model without it being conected to the original in anyway, I could accomplish a good smooth without the black streaky marks that so many of us modelers know and hate. :)

couldn't you just select the faces you want to smooth and smooth them? Why would you need to extract?

Just curious. ;)

The main reason you're not getting a smooth shade on your mesh is because one quarter of the surface has normals facing the opposite direction. You can view this by going to Display > Custom Polygon Display Options Box and turning on Face Normals. You'll notice that the black shading strips are along the edges where faces have extreme opposite normal directions.

Here is a simple way to fix this:

1. Select the mesh.
2. Conform the normals to face the same direction (Edit Polygons > Normals > Conform).
3. Reset the normals to get rid of the black strips (Edit Polygons > Normals > Set to Face).
4. Average the normals for a smooth shade (Edit Polygons > Normals > Average Normals).

Hope this helps.

On my helicopter model, if you smoothed any faces, you would get dark streaks everywhere. Since I don't know a thing about normals, I used my smoothing method, which resulted in no dark streaks.

I would have told Dann to mess with the normals, but he already had, so I assumed he needed a different way around the problem. If modifying the normals like Danny says works, then smoothing will become very easy for me. I really don't know all that much about normals, which is why I did what I did.

Well, I did steps 1, 2, and 3, but I can't agree with 4. (Average the normals for a smooth shade (Edit Polygons > Normals > Average Normals)

If I do 1 - 3, the dark streaks go away. When I do, they come back. *5 minutes later* Ok. Now I am at the conclusion that all you need to do is Set Face To Normals. If I only do this, everything is fine. What is the purpose of steps 2 and 4?

It was indeed the normals
 

Thank you all so much for your help.

Darkware, your orignial sugguestion did not work for me, but I might have been doind it worng. It kept trying to add polys which I don't want.

dannyngan: It was the normals. My model was orignally made from patches and I guess one of the patches had normals facing the wrong way so that's why it would not smooth shade from one forner patch to another. I just used conform to make sure all normals were uniform, and then set to face to make sure they were all pointing out from the center of their faces, and it looks nice now. (Well it's a crappy model, but it shades nicely) I did have to turn off the checkbox "Set User Normal".

However, (as with Darkware), Step 4 (Averaging normals) didn't seem to do anything good. It made 3/4 of my polys pure black, and the rest were flat gray.

:banana:

FYI, my file was in Maya 4.5

I forgot to mention that I deleted the history on the object before I did any of the above steps.