making hard edges in 3ds max for exporting to mudbox

thob

I recently made a really complex model of a destroyed wwii house using the rayfire plugin, so every brick is a standalone box, and i now need to export it to mudbox. The issue is swift loops are not possible because it would take weeks to add them to every box, and if i try to select all edges and chamfer them the application crashes. 
I would really appreciate your help because i'm quite of a newbie and this is my first serious project.
I would also appreciate if someone could help me to figure out why some of the bricks at the base have some shade at the right side and why some parts became darker after uvwunwrapping.
Thanks a lot for your help and any other suggestions are welcome.

oglu

use fbx and turn on smootihing groups in the export settings...

thob

sorry but i hardly understand what yo are talking about. You mean i should export it to mudbox using an fbx file? Also how do smoothing groups work? Thanks for your quick reply

musashidan

3dsMax has a little-known feature(it seems these days) called the official documentation. The hotkey is F1. There is a section dedicated to explaining the basics of smoothing groups.

thob

So i have to assign a different number to every adiacent face? Is there a way to do this automatically and not have to assign manually numbers to every face? Sorry but i read the documentation but it isn't really clear to me.

Axi5

Click autosmooth

thob

Thanks a lot that worked!

musashidan

Yes but do you understand why it 'worked'? This is more important than just clicking the AS button.

thob

I suppose it assigned a different number to every adiacent face...
But now i exported it to mudbox, i got a message saying  that two or more faces share more than one edge...is there any way to clean up geometry in 3ds max?

Axi5

It simply measures the angles between edges and applies the same or separate smoothing groups if they're over a certain degree which you can specify next to the Auto Smooth box.

Unfortunately as with all automatic procedures, depending on your geometry this can actually create some unwanted artifacts so sometimes some manual cleanup is necessary.

What is actually going on under the hood is that Max is using this concept of Smoothing Groups to control the vertex normals attributed to those groups. Faces which have the same number, will have their normals averaged. When a face's adjacent has a different number, the normal will be split to provide a hard/sharp edge.

Smoothing Groups are a Max (or Max inspired) only thing. They don't necessarily translate to other software well (though Maya can read them and reproduce similar results). You can check the resulting vertex normals by applying an Edit Normal modifier, then go back down the stack and modify the smoothing groups, so that the faces share the same ID's or differ. Then go back to the Edit Normal modifier and see the resulting blue vectors have changed.

thob

Ok...thank you all for your help but i think i'm working to  a too complex project for my skills and experience...i appreciated your help but i simply cant do this

Axi5

Try it on a cube and you'll begin to understand

thob

i think i now got how autosmooth works, but the problem with mudbox showed up after applying turbosmooth to have more edges

Obscura

Turbosmooth has a checkbox called "smoothing groups". Enable that, if you want to use your hard edges as creases.

Larry

What you have created is nice. But there are techniques for such scenes and meshes, to save complication and time managing all these assets one by one.