Mesh and Turbosmooth

[Brakelight]

Hi all,

I'm a max user for a long time now. I use it generally for low poly models. Though i make some hihg poly once a time. The point is, i always use meshsmooth for it. I always notice it takes loads of memory and thats just what my pc doesn't have. Now i found a post where they say that they use turbosmooth because it takes less memory. I tried it and it took indeed less memory. For the eye i got the same results as meshmooth.

Now is my question, what is the difference between mesh adn turbosmooth??

I've always been a bit of a person who sticks with the same because i know that. For the eye there is no difference but the memory it takes.

Thx and cheers, Brakelight.

[darth carth]

I think that the difference is that meshsmooth calculates how the mesh would flow everytime you turn or move your view, or when you edit it... With meshsmooth it doesn't add additional lines (untill you put another "edit poly or mesh over it) which makes things more overlooking.
Turbosmooth does the same calculation but does add lines to the mesh, when you put it on "interation 1" it only uses 1 additional line, on 2 it uses 2 and so on... It also places the lines so that you end up with the same curve, and so it doesn't need to calculate it everytime... down side is that you'll get a mesh with a whole load of poly's which isn't that clear to work with.

Well that my idea anyway... could be wrong, but I always use a turbosmooth cause it uses less memory like you said

[multimediaman]

I think it's less of an issue of how it calculates the smoothing, or how often it does... I think the only difference is turbosmooth uses a basic, static algorithm to smooth the model. Turbosmooth utilizes nothing more than the base mesh to define the end results.

"down side is that you'll get a mesh with a whole load of poly's which isn't that clear to work with."
-- actually you get that with both meshsmooth and turbosmooth. Meshsmooth has what's called Isoline display, if you're using max 5.0+, which shows only the control lines from the faces leftover from the base mesh. If you turn off isoline display, you'll see the model you're actually getting from the meshsmooth modifier. Turbosmooth on the other hand does not have that enabled by default, so you see the mesh from the start. You can enable it just the same.

Meshsmooth however does the same things as turbosmooth, except it uses a dynamic algorithm to smooth the model. The computations are the same, but what makes it dynamic, is that you can control the model from within the Meshsmooth.

With Meshsmooth, you can choose the smoothness of the end result. This takes a look at curvature, and topology to give you more smoothing on the potential problem areas of the mesh. This is helpful for adding smoothness to certain parts of the model, and not others.. For example, a character with 3 iterations of meshsmooth, and a Smoothness value of 0.866 instead of 1.0 has only 10,064 faces... But at Smoothness of 1.0, it has 132,4 faces, but the result looks basically the same.

But possibly the biggest difference, and here is where the excessive memory comes into play... Is that meshsmooth acts as almost another mesh editor. You can assign vertex weights, edge weights, edge creases, you can even move around your vertices, and completely change the model from within the modifier. For every level of meshsmoothing you apply, there's a whole new amount of levels of control for the mesh. It's got to keep track of all of that information, so that's probably where the memory goes to. After all, using a meshsmooth modifier at 2 levels would be like storing enough information for 16 clones of the model it's applied to. Now imagine that applied to every object within your file? Not a pretty sight. Especially when the professionals usually consider editing models within meshsmooth modifiers as a waste of time, because if something happens with the modifier and it needs to be removed, you've pretty much lost everything having to do with your edits.