Technical Advice
 

I'm modelling a woman for my reel, and I started off with cylinders to make the legs, chest etc. When I attached them and the breasts, and attempted to soften the normals and or smooth it. I'd still get hard edges. I went over each vertice and merged them again and I get the same results any advice?

a combo of "merge vertices" "merge multiple edges" and "cleanup" (to eliminate manifold geo)
plus convert to subd paired with convert to polys (level0)
should give you a suitably kosher geometry

this might sound dumb....and sorry if maybe it seems obvious.....but it happened to me once.......did you delete the faces for the ends of the cylinders?
Sorry again if this seems obvious.:eek:

Thats not a dumb question, but yes I did delete the ends of the cylinders. When I attached them.

Not sure if this relates, but there is a section in preferences that relates to polygons and how that should be rendered. The default is smooth, but there additional options that create harder edges. You might want to check if those options have been activated.

Actually I figured it out the cheap way, I just started up a new character and modeled her by one cube... and extruded her all the way up, then mirror duplicated. But I appreciate the help, I can't afford to debug a character on my schedule. I have less than 3 months to finish my reel now.

You can model anything with whatever you like, but this is usually from the normals being opposite. It leaves a hard/unsmoothed area around the join. Just go to normals - conform and that usually does the trick.