3DS: Smoothing Groups Lost on DETACH

olivierth

Hi,

I've done some smoothing group work on a low res gun but when I detach one element (any element) the smooth groups on that element are lost. It becomes all faceted.

I tried exporting and importing it before detaching but it's the same.

Thanks.

*Edit: The problem only happens on some elements of the gun. It's like there's a bug embedded in some of the geometry. If exporting to maya and re-importing into 3ds does not solve it, what else can I do?

Synaesthesia

Did you try attaching the mesh to a newly created box and removing the box afterward? That's always cleared up issues like that for me in the past.

olivierth

Well, I did a reset X form which does the same. There's also when I attached the buggy object again that it did worse.

I ended up adding a Normal modifier and using the "flip normals" option. After doing that, the problem was solved. The problem is, by doing so it's setting all polygons to the same smoothing group. I'm re-doing the SG again.

Thanks for trying to help me.

almighty_gir

yeah over the last few years 3dsmax has had some fucking ridiculous issues with normals like this, sometimes if you attach an object to another and then delete a face, all of the faces become faceted and inverted... broken as fuck.

thanks for reminding me to dl the modo trial

olivierth

Well, for me, this rarely rarely happens and when it does I simply need to add the normal modifier. This time was different since the smoothing groups were very important. It's not something that would make me switch software for.

Waz

Necro bump, I just ran in to this problem as well in 3ds max after importing a fbx sent to me from Maya. I need to detach a object but when I do, the smoothing groups are all lost. Anyone have some tips on this one?

monster

@Waz

When you import an FBX from Maya, most likely, your object no longer has smoothing groups, it's using Explicit Normals. Instead of detaching try cloning and deleting the unwanted parts of the model.

At some point, you might do an operation that breaks all the explicit normals. If this happens just add an edit poly mod to fix the normals and then recreate the smoothing groups.

Waz

@monster Great thanks!