smoothing groups

[samgriffiths]

I watched a gnomon video recently called 'Game body modeling', the guy in it uses smoothing groups before he unwraps and textures, do you guys do this and is it good practice for the industry?

[Kaskad]

Everybody uses smoothing groups. I don't know what else you would realistically use.

[samgriffiths]

Ok thanks, clears lots up for me.

[Tiros]

Well, as Kaskad said, everyone uses smoothing groups, unless there's some special reason for it to be faceted, but even then you will have to assign different smoothinggroups to the different faces, or I think it'd be autosmoothed when brought into some engines, atleast while exporting to obj, all faces that doesn't have any smoothing-groups automatically get put in smoothing-group 1.

However, when using maya, I havn't found any smoothing-groups option, just smooth and harden edge, so I guess it automatically adjusts the smoothing-groups depending on where you want the hard/soft edges which you set yourself.

As for the other 3d-applications, I have no idea, but no matter what application you use, there will always be smoothing-groups involved in your model, hidden or not

Cheers!

[Talon]

Smoothing groups are a 3DS Max specific way of defining your model's smoothing.

Maya has hard/soft edges, LightWave and modo have material-specific smoothing angles.

And yes, it's a very good idea to set them up properly as you go along with your modeling.