Maya edge smoothing issue

hellobard

I'm having a strange issue with some modular wall pieces that are curved and I can't for the life of me get these hard normal edges to soften out in Maya. I've tried to harden, soften, reverse the edges, manually set the edge normal angle and nothing will remove these seams. If I combine the modular pieces and merge the vertices along the edge then it works and I can smooth the normals to remove the seam...
However I would like to keep it a modular system, so does anyone happen to know of a possible solution for this issue? 

Bartalon

If those are two separate objects then you will need to use the Vertex Normal Edit Tool (Mesh Display > Vertex Normal Edit Tool) in conjunction with the Vertex Face selection mode to force the vertex normals of both objects to point in the same direction.

If your surface is planar along an axis you might be able to get away with simply grabbing the vertices of both faces and using the Set Normal Angle... tool.  So if you wanted those verts to point Z+, the normal angle would be 0, 0, 1; and 0, 0, -1 for Z-, and so on.

hellobard

Ah, fantastic, using the Set Normal Angle command on the vertices fixed it!
Thank you ever so much, Bartalon!

throttlekitty

I could've sworn that Transfer Attributes worked for normals at the component level, but I can't get it to work for the life of me now. (ie, select all overlapping border verts on two models and go)

Bartalon

throttlekitty said:

I could've sworn that Transfer Attributes worked for normals at the component level, but I can't get it to work for the life of me now. (ie, select all overlapping border verts on two models and go)

For it to work it needs a reference mesh with the desired smoothing, I don't think this particular Transfer Attributes setting allows per-vertex transfers (like vertex position does).  So yes @hellobard this is another method:

1) Make a copy of all your pieces and combine them, merge verts, and soften what used to be border edges
2) Select this combined mesh first, then one of your modules
3) Use Mesh > Transfer Attributes to transfer vertex normal direction.  Do this to each module

hellobard

Bartalon said:

So yes @hellobard this is another method:
1) Make a copy of all your pieces and combine them, merge verts, and soften what used to be border edges
2) Select this combined mesh first, then one of your modules
3) Use Mesh > Transfer Attributes to transfer vertex normal direction.  Do this to each module

Ah, I considered merging all the meshes like this, but when I extracted them out again I had the same problem. So that's very interesting to hear that I could have used Mesh > Transfer Attributes. The other method you suggested took a great deal of manual work to hit the correct normal directions on all the vertices, but it worked well

throttlekitty

Oh, there's also Mesh Display>lock/unlock normals. This can be helpful if you're breaking down a single object into multiples - but don't plan on making serious shape edits to each later.