Polys and Lighting (I'm very new)

dfanton · Sep 2012

Very, very new, in fact. A couple days. Well, I've been practicing on a spear in 3ds max (specifically this one), and after I'd made the blade, I noticed that the lighting was very weird and chiseled looking, and very strange up at those top four polys at the tip of the blade. I know next to nothing about lighting, yet, so I'm wondering if it has to do with the vertices and their placement, or if there's some lighting thing involved that would clear that issue up.

If more pictures are needed, I would be happy to supply them.

EDIT: And a rendered image. Also notice the shaft's strange shading. That's an 8-sided cylinder.

Aigik · Sep 2012

It's the smoothing groups. If you scroll down in the edit poly modifier controls on the right, you'll find a section for smoothing groups, with a series of numbers. Select the polys you want to be smooth, and set them to a smoothing group. The polygons that are set to a smoothing group will be smooth in relation to each other. If you have a set of polys that are smoothing group 1, and a set of polys next to them that are smoothing group 2, each set of polys will be smooth, but there will be a hard edge in between smoothing groups 1 and 2. Good luck.

dfanton · Sep 2012

Thanks! That worked perfectly.

Polys and Lighting (I'm very new)

Replies