Smoothing group tutorial

poopinmymouth

Anyone need to know how to use smoothing groups?

Blam! http://www.poopinmymouth.com/process/tips/smoothing_groups.jpg

Ramucho

that's a cool tut poop, but it's sad how people make tuts after you've learned and mastered those tricks
I remember I got interested into smoothing groups watching some of eoin colgan's artworks, he really makes a cool use of'em
http://eoincolgan.com/
Good work!

hawken

the master has to be pior. some of the best smoothing group useage ever can be seen on his models.

nice tut poop, I think you'd be wise to make a html version though

poopinmymouth

To be honest Hawken, for my shorter tutorials I prefer the jpegs. I don't think there is enough info that needs covering to warrant a full blown html. I reserve that for the more in depth subjects, because it takes so much longer. I do the jpegs when I expect it to be a quick reference type thing. People can same them to their hard drive for whenever they need it.

malcolm

Smoothing groups, ouch. I remember those things.

Eric Chadwick

Another one here, by our old friend Ryno.
http://www.ghouseproductions.com/tut_headC.html

Nice to have another resource Poop, thanks! Seems people have a lot of trouble understanding smoothing groups, I guess Discreet is dropping the ball a bit there.

poopinmymouth

I don't know Eric, I think mostly people are just lazy, and slow (in the head). Smoothing groups are very easy to understand, and they are in the frickin help file! I just made this cause I have seen way too many models in PnP that have 400 smoothing groups from the default creation, and haven't been touched by the artist. So I wanted a jpeg bomb to drop.

Snowfly

All good on the nose example, I thought all along you needed to split edges to get that creased look in max. Turns out multiple smoothing groups is it.

I'm trying to resist pointing out soft/hard edges in Maya.. oups.

Steve Schulze

Looks good, mate. My one criticism is that the right justification makes the text quite difficult to follow for some reason, particularly over on the right hand side where its hard up against the white border.

Ruz

doh I just leaned about smoothing groups at work , after ignoring them for about 10 years. nice tutorial poop

hawken

I've noticed in the past that quake 3 sort of ignores smoothing groups and smooths models but the way the UVW maps are built. Annoying huh?

ElysiumGX

[ QUOTE ]
I think mostly people are just lazy, and slow (in the head). Smoothing groups are very easy to understand

[/ QUOTE ]

Most new users probably look down at all those numbers and think "wtf?". I never understood the advantage of numbered smoothing groups. With other apps you simply assign hard edges. Does max allow overlapping smoothing groups based on the polygons selected? Or doesn't it only consider the edges?

With my work flow, I uvmap the mesh first, then assign the hard edges. I've had situations where applying a UVmap destroyed them.

Eric Chadwick

I've been using max since it was in DOS, and I agree that numbering faces is not an intuitive way to work. Edges make more sense.

But yes, max does allow each face to use more than one group, so the application of that is when you set 2 groups on the faces that border the termination of a crease, so then the crease fades out there.

I think it should be mentioned that every creased edge basically just duplicates those edge vertices in-game. I think some artists don't realize there's a "hidden" cost for those smoothing groups/creases.

You only get one normal per vert, right? The worst case would be someone using a unique SG per face to get faceted shading, since this would balloon the vertex count of the model, which could lead to a transform bottleneck.

Thanks again Poop, your tutorials are a great resource. Keep 'em coming!

Snowfly

heh..that's been pointed out in the ActorX manual over at UDN. Baking smoothing groups into the mesh is equivalent to placing cracks in the model...once you get a texture onto the model, hard edges don't really count for much anyway. Just keep the whole thing in one smoothing group.

That said, smoothing groups do help the model's appearance a lot, if it isn't high enough resolution to be properly lit as poop pointed out.

Smoothing groups do come in handy on high res models for normal mapping, since you retain the soft/hard edges in the map, without having to create double verts in the low res version. UV breaks is another story...

steady

hehe pewp tried explaining this to me in person but i was like "uhh yeah whatever you say"
but now i understand
thanks pewpz