Edge smothness

Buyatchaka

Hello everyone,

Recently I came across something that I had never seen and it's driving me insane to figure it out.
I am used to do, and to see all around people using 2 support edges around a corner to get a smooth result.
Example:

That's very common.

Problem is, I was checking a model from a game ( no other reason than studying it ), and I found something very weird.
The edges were chamfered ( 2 edges instead of 3 ), but still, the smoothness remained as if there were 3.
Example:



The model has no smoothing groups applyed to it, and as a result, if I detach any of it, it gets faceted all over.

How was this accomplished? 

Thank you!

m4dcow

It is using face weighted vertex normals. Also smoothing groups are simply Max's way of splitting vertex normals, that concept doesn't really exist in other software.

Buyatchaka

m4dcow said:

It is using face weighted vertex normals. Also smoothing groups are simply Max's way of splitting vertex normals, that concept doesn't really exist in other software.

Thank you so much, I'll look it up right now.

Eric Chadwick

Some info here
http://wiki.polycount.com/wiki/Face_weighted_normals

poopipe

I keep seeing people using the support loop trick and I wish they would stop. 
 If you can afford that, you can afford an actual bevel because it has the same amount of geometry. You'll also avoid the crappy shadow artefacts that come with it. 

huffer

Yeah, but at the first LOD if you delete the two supporting loops the edge of your surface will change and it's more work to fix. And more importantly, if you're doing an actual bevel and you can't use face weighted normals the surface will have gradients.

Buyatchaka

Eric Chadwick , thank you so much. I was able to recreate it on my model using max's plugin from the link you sent.

poopipe,  huffer, that's interesting, are there more up/downsides to each technique? 
This seems like a great way to improve hardsurface skills.

Also, is there some way to mix Wieghted Normals and smoothing groups usage inside Max?

Eric Chadwick

Buyatchaka said:

Also, is there some way to mix Wieghted Normals and smoothing groups usage inside Max?

You can use Smoothing Groups first, then Edit Normals after, to bend those normals. But you can't do the reverse.

Buyatchaka

Eric Chadwick , thank you so much. I was able to recreate it on my model using max's plugin from the link you sent.

poopipe, huffer, that's interesting, are there more up/downsides to each technique? This seemed very good to improve my work.

Thanks guys, I alredy learned a lot from you 

Buyatchaka

Eric Chadwick , thank you so much. I was able to recreate it on my model using max's plugin from the link you sent.

poopipe, huffer, that's interesting, are there more up/downsides to each technique? This seemed very good to improve my work.

Thanks guys, I alredy learned a lot from you 

poopipe

huffer said:

Yeah, but at the first LOD if you delete the two supporting loops the edge of your surface will change and it's more work to fix. And more importantly, if you're doing an actual bevel and you can't use face weighted normals the surface will have gradients.

For LODs - plan properly and it wont be a problem 

You can still mess with normals if there's a bevel.

The technique has its place (massive things with weird resource budgets etc.)  but that place is not 'everywhere because its quick' and that's what i see an alarming amount of. 

My main gripe is that it's incredibly inefficient.
Eg. 
A cube with support  edges has 108 triangles - for the same silhouette as one with 12.  Call me old fashioned but you're going to need a pretty compelling argument to pass that off as a sensible use of resources. 

In my experience, if an object is small enough on screen for this technique to not look crap its also small enough for a single hard edged bake or a single segment hard edged bevel to not look crap.

If it's not that small, you need the geometry or it'll look crap.