Hard edges are horrible if you're baking a normalmap from one mesh (high-poly) to another (low-poly). If you're not baking, like you're just using Crazy Bump, or no bumps at all, then hard edges are better since it's faster. I try to avoid them though because they only make an infinitely-hard edge.
Eric, Maya lets you just click an edge and set it to hard or soft - honestly I think it's easier than smoothing groups 95% of the time - Smoothing groups took me a lot longer to work my head around than "hard edge/soft edge" Bevels can be better but they're not always the best solution and they aren't going to provide the…
If neighbor faces share the same SG then the edge between them is smooth. If neighbors don't share the same SG, the edge is hard. Easy. But the cool trick in Max is that each face can be assigned to multiple SGs. So for a super-low-poly face, like Ryno's here, you can make a hard edge between the lips, and still have…
Yo there (I guess I could walk down but I don't know where you sit haha) On the example above you could very well have SG5 and SG1 being the same, for the exact same result. also you can have a face be part of multiple smoothing groups, and obviously the reverse is true since a SG can pan on multiple faces. Basically you…
If you are going to normal map it, you could bevel your edges aswell. Performance would stay the same as using different "smoothing groups", since your breaking verts with the group splits, but your adding verts with the bevel (assuming your keeping them all on one group). Although, only bevel if you normal map will give…
This might not be helpful to this thread at all... but just something that always confused me about smoothing groups. Are you supposed to assign a NEW smoothing group to each section of geometry? What if for some insane reason you have 1000 different section. Do you create 1000 smoothing groups? What about the edge shared…