Max- extruded polygons have no smoothing group

Mauser

when I make a cylinder for example and I extrude a cap face, the polygons have no assigned smoothing polygons where as the original polygons are assigned to 4. It's not that much of a problem, just a huge annoyance when modeling. does anyone know how to fix?

renderhjs

are you working perhaps with a Mesh or other primitive object instead of a editablePolygon? The reason why I think that could be the reason is because only with b-mesh technology smoothing/ vertex groups and material ID's are preserved when extruding. Editable Poly has such capabilities- so try to do it with ePoly object.

Mauser

it is an editable poly

MoP

Nope I have the same issue, whenever doing Shift-drag extrusion, or using Cap to fill holes, it just never assigns a smoothing group to the new polys.

Even worse is Bridge which assigns different smoothing groups based on face angle threshold, and there doesn't seem to be a way to turn that off...

renderhjs, do you know something I don't? Whenever I've used EPoly for modelling I have exactly the same problem, it just doesn't respect smoothing groups when creating new geometry. I wish there was a way to have a default smoothing group set on new polys, is there a secret option somewhere for that?

Mark Dygert

Yea that's annoying. I normally just hit autosmooth, or I don't care because I'm working in flat shaded view, or just assign everything to 1. It's never really bothered me that much. But it would be nice to know if there is a simple setting change that causes them to inherit smoothing.

What about selecting a ring, hitting connect so it makes a new loop and then moving the top poly? Kind of a hack work around but with polyboost/graphite modeling tools swiftloop makes it pretty easy to toss in loops without having to extrude.

MoP

You can also just slap a Smooth modifier on top of your stack to keep everything in one smoothing group or at a particular angle.
Usually I'm working with sub-d stuff anyway so smoothing groups don't matter. In fact I tend to just set all smoothing groups off before I start modelling, so extrudes/caps not using SGs doesn't bother me that much.

Mauser

alright, thanks guys

Kitteh

You could try doing the "Grow" command on your selection (with the freshly extruded polygon selected) so it'll select all the new polygons that have no smoothing group. Then, just simply autosmooth or assign smoothing groups or whatever

pior

I now tend to model with a material set to 'facetted'. At least you always see what youre doing, and a turbosmooth of 2 or 3 makes stuff completely smooth anyways. Problem solved!