Weird Maya smoothing angle issue

Cortes

Hey guys. I have a weird problem in Maya. I compared my mesh in another app (Modo) and set the smoothing angle to 150 and it looks fine (see on the right)

However, in Maya (left obviously) the smoothing seems to sharply cut off at a random edge, making the character's face seem narrower than it is. It even appears when I add my texture. It's odd and I'm not sure if there's a way to get rid of it. The light hits it the same weird way no matter what smoothing angle or material I choose.

Is this even something to care about? No other app seems to give me this weird issue, so I'm going to assume it wouldn't appear in an engine like Unity or whatever. But besides the point, I think it's gonna be distracting when I start making animations so I'd like to remove it.

Any advice to make it shade like in Modo would be appreciated.

kwyjibo

I've never used modo, but it looks likes there might be different normals. Check mesh controls in attribute editor in maya and check the setting you're using for interpolating the shared vertex normals (soft edges). The modo screenshot looks like it has some bounce lighting applied.

kwyjibo

By the way, smoothing angle doesn't affect vertex normals (and therefore shading), it just a way of setting which vertex normals are split or shared between faces.

antweiler

I guess maya and modo just interpret the normals differently, so will do a game engine (which has implications on normalmaps..)

You can adjust Mayas behavior in the meshs shape settings -> Mesh Controls ->Vertex Normal Method

This influences unlocked normals. To get exactly the same normals, you will need to import them from Modo and keep them locked (explicit normals)

Cortes

Yeah. I imported a slightly older save of the mesh with its default smoothing angles and the weirdness isn't there. Something happens when importing between the two apps to give it that appearance. I won't bother fiddling with the smoothing as I managed to make it look decent enough in the older mesh before I messed with the angle in Modo. I just preferred the alternate angle because it removed some of the sharper edges I disliked. Regardless it's a fairly low poly main character mesh that is not large on screen, and the character is supposed to be wearing armor anyway so I tested the texture and can get away with some sharp edges (the armor texture is darkly colored as well). I will tinker with it in Maya a bit anyway as people here have suggested though. 

kwyjibo

Surely modo has a way of locking the normals. Then you export your fbx  with explicit normals from modo. Import into Maya and the normals should be as you set them in Modo. You can confirm this after importing into maya by selecting your mesh and turning on display>polygons>vertex normals in maya. If they are yellow, they are locked and as defined in the fbx file. If they are green their direction will depend on which vertex normal method is set in attribute editor (probably Angle and Area Weighted).

Cortes

I wish this forum had an upvote feature Thanks!