is this a normals issue or something else?
I'm working on another gun...
Those shaded areas of my gun, strange shadows, are those areas I need to normal-unlock or maybe I deleted too much geometry while trying to poly clean up?
Thanks, this bothers me.
Those shaded areas of my gun, strange shadows, are those areas I need to normal-unlock or maybe I deleted too much geometry while trying to poly clean up?
Thanks, this bothers me.
Replies
Polygons are treated by your video card as groups triangles. When you have long, thin triangles, changes in the polygon normal that wouldn't usually be noticeable suddenly pop out because the shading is very abrupt. Because these n-gons are made up of multiple triangles and some sides of the n-gon are shorter than others, you have some long, thin triangles. You need to either play with smoothing or rebuild those areas with better, more evenly distributed topology.
Basically what is happening here is that you're trying to stretch a square over a curved surface. Think of quads as DVD's, you may be able to bend a DVD a little bit over a curved surface but if you do it too much you'll snap it in two. It's a little bit like that with geometry that gets divided into triangles. If you try to bend polygons too much then they start giving you shading errors.
The natural solution in this case is to:
1- Use some more geometry to translate those curves and transitions more gradually or in a controlled fashion.
2- Keep flat surfaces, FLAT. It'll just make your life easier if you're dealing with planar surfaces on things that are supposed to be planar.
Also what isn't drawn on my crazy picture is the fact that whenever you cut holes, try to end them as soon as possible in the most controlled fashion possible. You can see I threw in a border edge on each side. Make little triangles go into each corner. From that point on, you deal with nice 4 sided strips of geometry rather than messing with Ngons and possibly getting shading errors.
some "progress" shots