Unable to remove faceting

scotty_b

Hi everyone,

I have a question about a problem I'm having with a simple model I'm working with. i'm no expert at this so forgive me if this is obvious.

I have this model of a wine glass which was all in triangles and I want to convert to quads (I want to duplicate some of the geo so I can create a liquid that can deform inside). Anyway as was removing the triangles I had to re-build and modify a few areas and in the process deleted a couple of extra faces that I had to add back in. Now when I smooth the normals or switch to smooth preview i get this facetted look around the areas I modified.

Here is a screen grab:



I have tried conforming the normals, merging verts (.001 threshold) deleting the faces and re-appending them, I've deleted all history along the way and I even tried exporting as a clean obj and re-imported with no luck. I'm using Maya2013x64

Any ideas?

Thanks,
Scott

Bartalon

I would try using Normals > Unlock. If that doesn't work, check for flipped normals in the problem area, as nonmanifold geometry will always cause hard edges.

EDIT: Unlocking normals may cause your entire model to lose its smoothing information, but they should be editable afterward.

scotty_b

Thanks Bartalon but, no luck unfortunately.

Reversing the selected Normals made it worse and I cant see anything wrong with the face/vert normals.

It's so frustrating

Bartalon

Odd! I re-read your post and you mentioned switching to smooth preview and you still get faceting. Generally, everything in the smooth preview should be smooth with no obvious pinching or dark patches. If this is happening then it's a problem with the geometry of the model more than it is with the edge normals.

Select your model and Try Mesh > Cleanup... and set the following:

Cleanup Effect:
_Operation: Select matching polygons
_Scope: Apply to selected objects

Remove by Geometry:
_Lamina faces
_Nonmanifold geometry
_Normals and geometry
_Edges with zero length
_Faces with zero geometry area

If there is nothing wrong with your mesh, it will deselect. Otherwise, any related polygons or vertices that are causing issues will be selected for you.

scotty_b

Still no luck... not sure what I have managed to do here but it's really weird.

I'm beginning to think I might be better off just re-moddeling the whole thing considering how much time I have already spent on it I probably should have just started from scratch in the first place.

Still frustrating that I can't work this one out though.

Thanks again Bartalon

Bartalon

Yeah, not sure what else to suggest without having a look at the model itself.

scotty_b

Here's a link to the model. If you get a moment and can work it out let me know how.

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/8296143/wine_glass_v08.ma

no rush, much appreciated.

Scott

Bartalon

Got it!

Okay so your model is sound; the normals are flipped inside out on the entire model but I assume that happened while you were trying to figure out how to fix the faceting on the model.

The issue is Maya itself. It has never been very good at rendering transparency in the viewport unfortunately. Working in Viewport 2.0 will fix your issue, as long as you set a specific Viewport 2.0 performance option:

Change "Transparency Algorithm" to Depth Peeling. Your faceting should disappear.

scotty_b

Awesome, Works!

Thanks for taking the time Bartalon.

Scott