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General Category => General Anim8or Forum => Topic started by: Lama on March 16, 2009, 09:40:48 am

Title: How smoothing?
Post by: Lama on March 16, 2009, 09:40:48 am: Please can someone tell to me step by step, how I can smooth an object.
Every time I try to smoothing, nothing happends :-\

Thanks
Geli
Title: Re: How smoothing?
Post by: $imon on March 16, 2009, 09:45:07 am: Hey lama,

If you mean by smoothing , getting rid of hard creases, try double clicking on the object and changing the smooth angle; lower smooth angles make for a more creased object, higher for a smoother surface.

If you want some edges to crease and others to smooth, you can select the edges and go to Edit > Edge Properties and fill out different things there.

A different meaning of the word 'smoothing' is subdividing, which can be done from Build > Convert to Subdivide.

All of this is probably in the manual too, so if you want to know more, that is probably the place to look.

Good luck!
Title: Re: How smoothing?
Post by: Lama on March 16, 2009, 10:25:52 am: Thanks $imon,

to subdividing the objects is no problem, but in context with e.g. extruding faces, the effect is not good.

I have tested the two other ways for smoothing, but I don´t see any effect.
Maybe its too much subtil for my old eyes ;)

Now I try to render an image before and after smoothing, in slight hope to see a difference.

Geli
Title: Re: How smoothing?
Post by: $imon on March 16, 2009, 12:01:32 pm: Maybe you can post a picture of what you have made &or what you want to achieve so we can have a look at it!

The smooth angle doesnt have much of an effect with small changes, it gives the angle at which an angle smooths or not, so with a value of 0 all angles are sharp. With a value of 360, all angles are smooth. So sometimes quite rigorous value changes have to be made to get the desired effect.
Title: Re: How smoothing?
Post by: Tanzim on March 17, 2009, 05:51:26 am: If you've set your smooth angle really high, it can a look a bit weird when you extrude a face, you may just have to experiment a bit.
Hey Simon, max smoothing is 180 degrees, not 360.
Title: Re: How smoothing?
Post by: $imon on March 17, 2009, 06:10:45 am: OOpsie.. figured that haha =) my fault

tnx tanzim
Title: Re: How smoothing?
Post by: yetanotherpeter on March 17, 2009, 07:41:21 pm: I don't know whether this matches OP's intention at all, but my dream tool for smoothing would an effect working on specified volume which minimizes a suitable chosen energy function of the mesh.

In the ideal case (which I assume isn't achievable) any two dimensional quadric (ellipsoid, hyperboloid) would have energy zero and the tool would drag vertices towards the quadric approximating their neighborhood.
Title: Re: How smoothing?
Post by: kreator on March 18, 2009, 02:59:48 am: hows does that work in laymans terms?
Title: Re: How smoothing?
Post by: yetanotherpeter on March 18, 2009, 06:36:08 am: Quote from: kreator on March 18, 2009, 02:59:48 am
hows does that work in laymans terms?

I'm quite a failure regarding explanations in laymans terms, but:

Think some sort of elastic surface as an approximation of the vertices in a neighborhood. If now some vertices are off from the overall gestalt of the surface, the elastic forces will pull them back to towards it. It's a bit like splines, which can be thought as elastic rulers trying to fit points, see:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smoothing_spline

Quadrics because all smooth surfaces look locally like a quadric, it's some sort of taylor expansion:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taylor_expansion
Title: Re: How smoothing?
Post by: Tanzim on March 19, 2009, 05:42:10 am: Do you mean like sub-division smoothing?
Title: Re: How smoothing?
Post by: yetanotherpeter on March 19, 2009, 01:57:33 pm: Quote from: Tanzim on March 19, 2009, 05:42:10 am
Do you mean like sub-division smoothing?

Not really. Subdivisioning is only good, if the existing vertices are good. If they contain noise, other artefacts or less than optimal construction, subdivisioning doesn't help.

OTOH, it is of course a valuable step together with smoothing, but if your vertices come from digitization, you may even want to reduce the number of vertices.