Hard and Soft shading workflow UX.
The mesh shading workflow in Blender is a bit confusing and requires few steps than it should be.
I know there are different types of requirements for games and films but there needs to be one unified and straightforward UX with good defaults that provide a middle ground.
I spent few weeks trying to figure out why my models shading in blender don't look correct, watched tons of videos, read the articles and so on, I managed to learn more about it but the workflow and the experience were slow & confusing.
Coming from Maya things were much more easier in general so you don't have to think about all this stuff unless it's needed, You put your whole focus on the modeling & design instead.
Basically you have soft, hard and auto options that can be applied on edges or the whole mesh with angle control for each., not only that face weighted normal is also part of the mesh with the face area and angle set as the default so you don't have to worry about this important part.
while in Blender , You have to face smooth shade then enable auto smooth set it to 180 degrees for smooth or 30 for what's known as auto, enter edit mode ,select all sharp edges, mark sharp add weighted normal modifier, enable keep sharp then you can have 1 to 1 results and you have to repeat this on hundreds of models and some of them have different modifiers so you can't just copy from one to the others.
So instead of the user having to fiddle with all these settings and what not there needs to be only three options in the menu with some angle presets.
.
Flat as it's now : sets smooth angle to 0 which gives you the flat
shading.
Smooth : sets the angle to 180°.
Auto : set the angle to 30°.
And face weighted normals should be part of the mesh since it's important for hardsurfaces with smooth shapes and gives better results than Blender's default shading, also when using the subdiv modifier these options need to be switched off or not taken into account as of now the sharp edges somehow show up there too but that's not a big deal since you would use one or the other depending on your workflow.
This way the user is only left with the decision on when to mark or clear the sharp edges.
2 Comments
I'm not sure how to feel about this. On the surface, Blender offers a lot of flexibility and user customization....I know exactly what the normals on my model are doing and they're only edited if I want them to be. If these features are on by default, there's the potential I could be turning things OFF more often, which negates the benefits.
A potential universal solution to this would be to have Auto Smooth on by default instead, and call it a day. I can think of many more situations I would want Auto Smooth to be on than wanting to use solely flat/smooth shading. It also wouldn't require me to switch it on when using face-weighted normals.
HOWEVER, this screws with people that use low-poly aesthetics, where everything must be flat shaded. Face-weighted normals also messes with hard bevels.
I don't think that Blender's default settings are inconvenient enough to warrant this, since they appeal to the widest range of users possible. I haven't used Maya or other 3D packages much though, so I'm most likely biased here.
There isn't much of change here besides few UI tweaks, the only thing serious is making the weighted normal part of the mesh , sometimes giving users too much control can slow down the workflow hence good defaults are a must.
I wonder if it's possible to make different settings change through an addon, that could be a solution for what you're suggesting, It could be shipped with Blender but we need the weighted normal as part of the mesh with all the settings setup properly when enabled.