architectural hard edges in mudbox

jag.med

hey guys,

im trying to export my architectural mesh (a back alley building) from 3ds max to mudbox but to do so i need to create edge loops in max to keep the hard edges. everytime i do i end up spending a lot of time and end up ruining the mesh and having to start over again.

i guess what im asking is,

1.do any of you know of any tutorials i can watch or read that will explain how to do this efficiently?

2.do i need uvmaps applied to the mesh to export even though i am normal mapping in max?

thanks, ive been stuck on this for awhile and my instructor didnt know what to do either.

pior

Give your max model hard edges (smoothing groups) where you want the hard edges to be.
Apply turbosmooth on that object (value 3 or so) and tick 'use smoothing groups' or whatever its called
Export this to Mud.

Now the mesh will be very dense even at level 0. Once you subdivide once more in mud you will keep all the main forms, and get a very nice, slightly rounded hard edge effect.

zerg

are there any other ways to achieve this? smoothing groups confuse me.

Ghostscape

zerg wrote: »

are there any other ways to achieve this? smoothing groups confuse me.

You really need to learn them, they're used all over and are essential to 3d modeling and game art at a general level.

kdm3d

smoothing groups are the best and fastest way, and also makes it so you dont lose your original mesh...

What part of smoothing groups confuses you? Any specific questions?

Eric Chadwick

A tutorial.
http://www.poopinmymouth.com/process/tips/smoothing_groups.jpg

The help file.
http://docs.autodesk.com/3DSMAX/13/ENU/Autodesk%203ds%20Max%202011%20Help/index.html?url=./files/WSf742dab041063133-2a605991112a1ce7a04-7ff1.htm,topicNumber=d0e19200

zerg

thanks guys, i will read those. if i'm still confused, ill let you know with what exactly. :thumbup:

yiannisk

zerg wrote: »

thanks guys, i will read those. if i'm still confused, ill let you know with what exactly. :thumbup:

I hope you figured it out?
it is pretty straight forward and as someone already said essential!

Neox

smoothinggroups straight forward? i dunno but mayas hard edge is straight forward, max smoothinggroups are pretty complicated iun comparison

monkeyboy_garth

Haha, yes...Max's smoothing groups are a pain in the butt.

It should be a piece of cake for a building though. Ticking 'By Angle' in the Selection tab helps for selecting polys that are facing a similar direction, just select each wall and give them all a different smoothing group number.

Eric Chadwick

monkeyboy_garth wrote: »

Haha, yes...Max's smoothing groups are a pain in the butt.

It should be a piece of cake for a building though. Ticking 'By Angle' in the Selection tab helps for selecting polys that are facing a similar direction, just select each wall and give them all a different smoothing group number.

Auto Smooth is better though, just a couple mouse clicks... Select all the faces, set the threshold angle (any edges less than this angle will be soft), and click Auto Smooth.

Ben Apuna

Another approach would be import your models without extra edge loops then in Mudbox go to Mesh -> Add New Subdivision Level -> click the little box and uncheck Smooth Positions.

Now you can subdivide your model and the edges will remain crisp. However this method doesn't work if your model needs the subdivisions to help smooth or round out any shapes.

rasmus

There's also that nice script for Max to apply smoothing by edge as in Maya...

Joao Sapiro

that script is good, but causes a bit of a mess with the smoothing groups leading to some shading errors on normal bakes at least

Michael Knubben

To make smoothing groups easier to work with, I use polyboost's functionality. It has three buttons relating to SG's, 'hard', 'smooth' and 'auto' (or something similar, working from memory here). Shiftclicking those buttons only applies the effect to the selected faces, which means selecting a few faces and shift-clickiing 'smooth' adds all of those faces to a unique sg's, effectively giving the outside of your selection hard edges.
This way, I actually quite like working with them, even though initially I was also more of a fan of the hard/soft edges workflow.

For those who use 2010: Polyboost is the plugin that is now integrated into 2010 as the ribbon/polytools/graphite tools