[3ds max] Poly shading issues (incompetence)

[psychodaddy]

hello there,

i am really having some sort of topology problems with my heads. i can't seem to get a good flow to have a smooth shading and its already like 800ish tris which is too much for a low poly head. ive modeled like 20 heads the last 2 days and i can't seem to get a good low poly head for a decent amount of tris.

i was wondering how you guys are getting good head results without really exceeding the poly limit ?

thanks in advance for your time and tips.

[Pankake]

That's pretty normal really, you can help the shading by relaxing those areas a bit, trying to make the curves of the mesh as smooth as possible, or by adding more edge loops. Models are shaded per-vertex, so the more verts on the mesh, the smoother the shading will be.
That or have a high res mesh of the face to bake a normal map from, this way the normal map will take care of the shading and will look a lot smoother.

[Talon]

Yeah, that's pretty normal.

If it's still bothering you, you can just manually triangulate those polys and try and ensure that you get the most even tris you can out of it (long thin tris - especially next to nice fat ones - will cause dodgy shading).

[glynnsmith]

I second what those guys said.

Also, using well-thought out smoothing groups can help quite a bit. Your head looks pretty low poly, so you might be able to utilise smoothing groups all the way up to your final piece.

If not, you're probably going to be normal mapping, which will help somewhat.

A better lighting rig will also help

[psychodaddy]

thanks for the replies guys. very informative.

glynsmith, what do you mean by lightning rig ? its the first time im hearing this term

[glynnsmith]

The arrangement of lights within your scene, basically

With max's default light, it's basically a spotlight glued to the camera. If you dragged some lights into your scene, played around with the position, colour and brightness, your vertex shading wouldn't be so harsh and undesirable

Even if you texture him up, you'll still want a better lighting rig to show him off, so I always draft something up in the beginning stages, so I have a better idea of what's going in.