Smoothing With Modo

mats effect

So I am pretty use to the way 3DS Max does smoothing groups and recently I have been using modo for some stuff and I can't quite get my head around how smoothing works.

Is it just a matter of setting the surface normal's smoothing and angle and that't it? No way to set groups or anything like that?

Any help would be awesome

thanks!

Bek

Native settings have surpassed just angles iirc (you also have smoothing groups), but anyway it doesn't matter because Farfarer's got your back: http://www.farfarer.com/resources.htm

Vertex Normal Toolkit. Set hard/soft edges, by angle, and even better, by UV seams. The Texel density kit is cool too.

WarrenM

Yeah, another vote for Farfarer's vertex toolkit. I use it on every mesh I build.

901 looks to have zero improvements in the smoothing groups area.

mats effect

Sadly I can't use plugin's with the indie edition

Farfarer

MODO does have smoothing groups, but they're a bit shonky (they don't blend together particularly well) and there is no Max-like UI for it.

You can assign them to your polygon selection via "Geometry > Polygon > Set Smoothing Group..." or you can assign that command (poly.setSmooth) to a button and call it from there.

You can select/deselect them via the Statistics panel (Lists tab on the right, then Statistics panel and Polygons > By Selection Set and use the little + and - buttons beside the smoothing group).

One thing to note is that the smoothing groups aren't numbers like Max has. You've got uppercase letters, lowercase letters and numbers (and also some special characters, although officially you shouldn't be using those).

So a polygon assigned a smoothing group of "1" with smooth with any other polygon assigned with another smoothing group that has a 1 in it (e.g. "12", "abc1", "Ab123", etc).

Basically if any character in the smoothing group matches any character in the other polygon's smoothing group, they'll smooth together.

The upshot of this is that you get a lot more smoothing groups than Max has (Max has 32 I think, where MODO has - officially - 62).

They're still looking at ways to get white-listed kits accessible to Indie in a way that doesn't allow users to abuse them for the purpose of working around limitations, but obviously 901's been the main priority over there for the last while :P

mats effect

Helped a lot Farfarer cheers!

Good to know they are looking at plugins for the indie edition as well.

igi

Farfarer wrote: »

MODO does have smoothing groups, but they're a bit shonky (they don't blend together particularly well) and there is no Max-like UI for it.

You can assign them to your polygon selection via "Geometry > Polygon > Set Smoothing Group..." or you can assign that command (poly.setSmooth) to a button and call it from there.

I've been using that tool which has max-like smoothing groups UI. But now rarely using it since introduction of your tool.

Download link in the original thread seems to be dead, but if anyone wants to give it a go you can grab it here

Hut

Hi mate!
As things are going now with the smooth groups? Should i install a third-party plug-ins for this, or the latest version of Modo has nicely by default for smoothing?

Gazu

What about Smoothing Groups from UV Shells like in TexTools?
Can i do that in Modo?

Bek

if you're talking only about the stupid and archaic polygon-based "smoothing groups" which I hope no one still uses then IDK. If you're talking about the more logical and practical edge-based smoothing (with the now built in vertex normal toolkit) then yes. The VNTK also gives control of smoothing based on polygon/vert selection too if you're set on doing it that way; but it's a mystery why one would ever set edges to hard or soft with something other than an edge selection.

Gazu

Its my workflow in Max.
I first layout my UVs, then i use TexTools and click on Tools -> Smoothing Groups From UV Shells.
These are the best settings for a clean Bake. Its just one click and it took me one second.
I dont know why you think that this is stupid?

After this i can move on and export the LowPoly and bring it to Substance Painter for the Bakes.

Bek

You misunderstand me. I never said anything about smoothing by UV seams for lowpoly/baking. I said the concept of assigning hard/soft edges by a polygonal selection is dumb. Example: Cylinders where one of the side edges must be hard. Simple with edge selection; not so much with polygonal selection. Of course there's not many cases where you'd want that, but it's a basic example of where polygonal selections are sub-par.

If you open up the vertex normal toolkit in modo (by default I believe it's under the game tools layout) you'll find exactly what you want; the ability to set your UV seams to hard edges with one click. Before that was added to modo you had to use the original standalone toolkit, or a script like pipelineIO. No need to explain what it is or why you'd do that; I've been doing it for years. The VNTK is so important for lowpoly work you'll probably want to go ahead and add that to the main UI (via form editor).

Gazu

Thanks. That sounds good.

I will soon open a Thread where i will asks questions about my Workflow in Max, and if i can do my workflow in a similar way in Modo.
For now im missing things like Edge Constraints. Axis Constraints and so on.... but these are things for the new thread.

Gazu

Bek

Sure, I'll keep an eye out. There have been other max-to-modo threads (like this one) which you might find useful too. I'm not that familiar with max but edge/axis constraint sounds like action center's in modo. Or other more specific things like the edge slide tool.