Smoothing groups, Hard / Soft edges very confusing.
Hi,
Its Christmas, so merry Christmas. With it being Christmas it gives me a bit of time to play about in blender which is nice. however i am still very confused by the mark hard soft edge / Auto smoothing in Blender. in Maya its straight forward and clear as day but in blender i find it very confusing since coming from a Max and Maya background. i watched a video where a guy set the auto smoothing to 180 degrees and them marked hard and soft edges which seemed in his video to work. i tried this with strange results. either i'm doing something super wrong or the system is a bit bazaar. then there is shade smooth and shade flat...which is again another method.
so that is 3 methods?
Auto smooth, hard/soft edge and shade smooth/Flat???
is this going to get simplified / improved with 3 methods to do the same thing is seem utterly confusing to have so many methods all of which from what i see don't really play well with each other and from what I've seen there isn't one that overrides the other. the hard and soft edges seem like the logical winner, if you set it manually that is what it should be IMO.
Perhaps someone with more Blender knowledge and experience can enlighten me to where i am going wrong. Ultimately id prefer the Maya hard and soft edge to be the way to be doing this in blender and with the auto smoothing being a default that can be manually overridden.
Thanks P
4 Comments
There is nothing confusing about the system, it's perfectly intuitive. You want a sharp edge, you mark it sharp. You want a smooth one, you don't. Autosmooth set to 180 degrees means it will never automatically mark edges sharp. Shade smooth/shade flat merely turns the smoothing system on and off.
They're not the same, smooth & flat shade are the standard shading options which have no performance impact but auto smooth is the one where you can define Hard & Soft edges.
Maybe the UI & UX could be improved but imo performance for autosmooth should come first as without it you can't have proper hard edges in your heavy meshes as it also impacts animation playback .
I being worked with Max during years - now I work with Blender mostly. IMO " Hard edges " system much more comfortable when it need to set smoothing in complex mesh. Because Blender have mighty " selection " system, because of visualization, because it like work with seams - I work with edges where I want to see hardness not with polygons, etc.
If you have interoperability problems. After long time searching I found thing that can help with import Blender -> Max/Maya. This magic script for Max when you press " Enable " on imported from Blender FBX models it say that find some strange normals and ask to generate smoothing groups and generate correct smoothing groups even on complex mesh unlike Max own generator which make crap even on box (in Blender export smoothing " Edges ", in Max import without " Generate smoothing groups ").
forest. i dont use max anymore havn't done so in about 3 years. i much prefer the maya method of hard and soft edge. i'm simply a little confused that in blender there is 3 different methods to do it and find hard to get the result i want. i really do think this can be improved in blender, now that i have used it. i'm not looking to export my model back to maya unless i have to, but if i cant find a good way of doing the smoothing i may have to. don't get me wrong 2.8 is leaps and bounds ahead in terms of where i expected blender to be this year. the team have done a great job to get it to where it is now :)