Hello! In Blender, I have a mesh with properly hard edges set up and ready to export. My client asked me about the availability of smoothing groups in 3D Max. I export with Geometry>Smoothing>Edges. It works fine in most cases and after importing to Max there are correct smoothing groups, but in this case, it is incorrect…
Here is the screenshot when I imported the model from Blender without the 'smoothing groups' checkbox in Max. The shading is great but there are no smoothing groups. Maybe there is a way to generate smoothing groups from normals splitting in Max?
@Rivfader You could try to export as an .obj with "Bitflag Smooth Groups" enabled, and see if Max understands them (apparently Max uses exactly 32 smoothing groups as a maximum amount): P.S. Probably wise to uncheck the regular "Smooth Groups", if using the Bitflag one.
I can't tell from your post if the smoothing groups are importing from Blender into Max correctly, but aren't rendering correctly? If that's the case, the model may have explicit or custom normals set which will override the smoothing groups. In that case, you need to reset the models normals so the dynamic normals which…
Thanks to all of you, appreciated. @gnoop client said that with shading are no problems, but in the final version of the product he will reset all of the transforms and the normals may crash, and that why he needs smoothing groups set up. What do you think about that, is it possible? unfortunately, your solution doesn't…
Someone mentioned it above, but there has been some changes to normals in Max recentlyish. I thought there might be a script that would be able to compare vertex normals and convert them to a smoothing group, but all I saw real quick is this sort of stuff…
Just fyi; Because max's smoothing splits are done per-face instead of per-edge (or per triangle) some splits are actually impossible to transfer at a conceptual level. For instance, if two faces shared a series of edges but only some of those shared edges had a smoothing split you could not transfer them. This can be…
Depending on how your UVs are layed out, after import to Max you could set smoothing groups from UV seams using this tool by monster. There's also this post from Blenderartist forums that may help.
Why smoothing groups are so necessary? Anyway the geo is usually coming into a game engine as simply triangles and vertex normals with split hard edges and uv seams . That smoothing group approach is rather Max weird limitation because it doesn't have proper normal /attribute transfer and requires redundant extra edge…