SOLVED: Smoothing groups and hard/soft edges

kapgowild

Hey guys, I'm a Maya user and recently I've started using 3DS Max, so when I found out about smoothing groups I was okay, because in my head all that it was doing was adding hard edges between each smoothing group and soft edges on the same smoothing group. My surprise was when I tried to export a model to Maya, the shading looked correct, just as I set my smoothing groups, but when I toggled my hard/soft edges display, all the edges were hard. I'll post some examples with other objects.

This is a simple object in Max with 2 smoothing groups.


When I export it to maya, the shading looks fine, and all the edges around seem smooth.

But when I toggle to show only the hard edges, all the edges are hard, even though it doesn't look like it.

Also, if I try to set any of those edges to soft, or hard, the shading remains the same way as it was in max, it seems that the smoothing groups overwrite every hard/soft edge action that I take in Maya.
Can anyone explain to me why this happens? Is it just the way smoothing groups work or am I doing something wrong? I know it may not be a big deal, because my shading is working as I would like, but I just found it curious and wanted some answers xD thanks in advance.

Ghogiel

Assuming you exported and imported the normals correctly, I'm guessing it's probably the other way around, Maya overriding the smoothing by locking the normals. If so it doesn't matter what you set them to, hard or soft, they'll effectively be uneditable.

kapgowild

After a few tries, and digging through the import options in maya, what I found out is this, when importing geometry in Maya from Max, all the normals are locked, so the shading will look correct, but all the edges seem to be hard, even though they are not. If I change the presets in the fbx importer there's an unlock normals option, when ticking this box the imported geometry will keep the smoothing groups, and I can edit the normals, whilst if I do not tick this option, and manually unlock the normals in this object I'll lose the smoothing groups.

sprunghunt

kapgowild said:

After a few tries, and digging through the import options in maya, what I found out is this, when importing geometry in Maya from Max, all the normals are locked, so the shading will look correct, but all the edges seem to be hard, even though they are not. If I change the presets in the fbx importer there's an unlock normals option, when ticking this box the imported geometry will keep the smoothing groups, and I can edit the normals, whilst if I do not tick this option, and manually unlock the normals in this object I'll lose the smoothing groups.

I always import with unlocked normals from a FBX in maya. Locked normals are a silly feature of maya that's just not necessary to use.