Triangles at Top of Cylindrical Object - Bad Smoothing?

Dan Powell

Hi all,

I'm getting a weird smoothing group error at the top of this object, there's visible lines diving it up into triangles. Any idea why this is happening?



Cheers!
Dan

Dan Powell

Here are the UVs and Wireframe:

SuperFranky

Yeah, generally you need to avoid a lot of triangles that come together at one point. It's not going to work, and I think some engines really don't like that. So, just replace triangles with quads, it shouldn't take a lot of time.

Also, I have no idea what you're trying to do with this mesh, but if it's supposed to be a game-ready model, then you should simplify that and bake down highpoly to lowpoly.

Dan Powell

Hi, thanks for the reply.

I'll have a go at converting it to quads, but to be honest I'm not sure how I could go about that bearing in mind the current topology.

I'm not baking this object down because it's quite big in the scene - it's a big platform. I'm rendering in UE4 and I'm using a multi-sub material - one tiled material on the blue areas, and then one dedicated 0-1 texture on the grey areas. I'll post more screenshots shortly as I've worked around it by unwrapping it differently for now.

There's also a lot of construction edges in there - I plan to delete a lot of them (especially the rings in the centre). They were to help me position the textures.



The extra topology in the centre was to help me position the grates.



I've unwrapped it differently for now and this fixed the triangle smoothing issue, however it comes at a slight loss of resolution - but it's nothing too bad. It's on a 4K texture map at the moment, but I can't really think of any better ways to make the object.

Reference:

Bartalon

If you insist on having such a dense cylindrical surface, try this technique for capping. You should be able to go back in and collapse some edge loops and still avoid everything converging on a single vertex.



Image referenced from this album here.

Dan Powell

Cheers Bartalon.

commador

Dan Powell wrote: »

It's on a 4K texture map at the moment, but I can't really think of any better ways to make the object.

Tile the base material using a 512 or 1k, then layer the panel gaps, borders, inset hole punched panels, and the little circle details with decals from a 512 or 1k trim sheet.

huffer

Those look like normal map seams because of mirrored UV's, they could show up if the faces aren't on the same smoothing group; they could be present in 3dsmax or marmoset but not in-engine (vertex normals issue), haven't figured it out definitively.