Smoothing out a curved surface in Max?

CJE

I was wondering if anyone has a good technique for smoothing out a curved surface to remove subtle surface variations on a curved surface, such as a car, or other machined metal. Other than moving every vert 1 by 1 that is.

sprunghunt

Try using relax on it. It's in the edit geometry rollout of edit polygon. <- this is in 3dstudio max. I don't know if you can relax faces in maya.

leechdemon

Relax is nice if you want the surface to be FLAT flat, like on a side body panel. Around curves, you'll probably want the vert-by-vert method, although there's some sweet Maxscripts for speeding this up a bit. Check out: http://www.scriptspot.com/3ds-max/scripts/straighten-edge . To use that one, I'd do a loop vert-by-vert, then move over a few loops and do that one vert-by-vert, then Straighten the ring from Loop #1 to Loop #2. You'll have to straighten the rows one at a time, but if you skip 4 loops, it's still saving you a ton of time.

Mark Dygert

I wonder if working with or converting to nurbs surfaces would have any tools to help smooth out a curve... I'm not big into nurbs modeling but it seems like it might have something that could help? Might be worth looking into, if its as simple as "Convert to nurbs, tweak handle, convert back to poly".

I'm short on time otherwise I would look into it more.

Revel

What about Set Flow under graphite>loops>set flow (edge sub-object mode)?..usually it'll give a nice smooth result (you can press it a few times to get more relaxed edge flow, it's not gonna make it flat like what relax will do).

_Revel

cw

the relax in zbrush does a sort of relax but keeping volume somehow.

I wonder if a maxscript relax could be made which relqaxes each vert then push back along vertex normal by some factor to restore somewhat the volume. This may not be the solution for this particular problem but It's got me thinking!

sprunghunt

another thing you could try would be to make a spline that represents the curve you want and then snap your vertexes to points on the spline.

Ace-Angel

cw wrote: »

the relax in zbrush does a sort of relax but keeping volume somehow.

I wonder if a maxscript relax could be made which relqaxes each vert then push back along vertex normal by some factor to restore somewhat the volume. This may not be the solution for this particular problem but It's got me thinking!

Very possible in theory *wink, wink*

Although making it work on the Edit Poly object might be blasted hard...