Maya to Max | Hard/Soft Edges - Smoothing Groups Problem

Betaknight

Hi everybody!

I'm currently a bit stuck, but for the past 2 days, I've been trying to move a model from Maya 2018 using Hard/Soft Edges to control the hardness of edges. 

Problem is when I export the model (with Game Exporter) to FBX I have had this shading problem. From my understanding, Max doesn't use Maya's hard/soft edges functions, instead Smoothing Groups. 

I was wondering if there could be a way to import a model from Maya to Max, keeping the Hard/Soft Edges Data that was used in Maya by converting that to smoothing groups automatically?

Thanks guys! (Sorry if the pictures are too big, they were just snippets)


In Maya


Max: fbx without smoothing groups option ticked, therefore it doesn't have any smoothing groups


Max: Fbx exported with smoothing groups, normals are all wack

Pac_187

With FBX import in Max it's either Smoothing Groups or Explicit normals, you can't have both.

The bad shading, happens because of the way how 3ds max calculates normals.

Max does a simple average calculation based on the smoothing groups and face angles,

while Maya uses an algorithm which takes into account hard/soft edges + the area of a faces and angles of face-corners.

You can get the same behavior as Max in Maya by setting the Vertex Normal Method to "Unweighted" in the Preferences->Modelling settings.

Max does not provide any settings for this. You have to rely on 3rd Party scripts to calculate "Face-Weighted" normals.

More info about weighted normals:

http://www.bytehazard.com/articles/vertnorm.html

Info about Mayas Vertext Normal Method settings:

http://help.autodesk.com/view/MAYAUL/2018/ENU/?guid=GUID-232E99F8-96B4-4870-8BA0-4887C1C8F0F2

3ds Max Scripts

Free:

http://www.bytehazard.com/articles/wnormals.html

Paid:

http://www.scriptspot.com/3ds-max/scripts/improved-face-weighted-normals

Betaknight

Cheers for the information! I will definitely take a closer look!