Quote:
Originally Posted by scooter79rs
@GreenVampire, setting the normals angle is a quick way of getting hard and soft edges but it doesn't usually. What I do depending what I'm modeling is either completely hard or soft. With cars or people select the whole object then soften normals the normals accross the whole mesh will be 100% soft and some areas will look like crap from the normals (they did around the arches of the mk2 Escort in the uploaded pictures) now select the edges that you want hard normals on (I.E. Body lines, wheels arches, etc...) basically anything where there is a hard edge on the car in real life, after they are selected go the normals menu and select Harden Edge. This for low poly, if you some where for an edge line to between 100% soft or 100% hard thats when you would use the set normals tool
On the escort model shown here I only used soften edges (across hole the whole car) then used harden edges on the body lines.
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I've been playing around with the normal smoothing method and to be honest I think that just using the full hard, and full soft method gives bad results.
I've found that if the mesh is built with the intention of using the smooth normals, it can be handled quite nicely....
for example on your escort, if you deleted some of the edges going over the bonnet, and then created another poly line running around the wheel arches (close to the line joining onto the body) if you then used the poly smooth at about 75, it would give a nice little smooth blend into the body, rather than the sharp edge you have by using the two extremes of the tool
*edit*
attached is an image of the buick I just finished making, I used the "Extrude Edge" method for some of this, as well as "Split Poly Tool", then used different values of normal smoothing, never lower than 39, never higher than 75....
its by no means low poly, (about 65,000 finished, although alot of that is in wheels and light / grill details), but it has no mesh smoothing... which I am canny proud of
