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I think smoothing groups should be dumped and removed completely,......
there is no game engine in existence that handles split normals with smoothing groups, in fact game engines cant even render verts with multiple normals, and just split the vertex to get the same effect.
The fbx importer of unreal can read smoothing group data, or it can just explicitly read the vertex normal list from the file. I do it all the time since i work in maya and develop for UE3 and UE4
Like i said multiple times in this thread smoothing groups are just a method to control split normals, and have little to nothing to do with the data underlying it all.
Having both systems, the max like smoothing groups, and the maya like hard and soft edges is just going to lead to confusion.
I have made the tools as requested
The data is actually on each individual vertex.
The related data is not bound to the smoothing groups or hard edges settings, in fact there is no hard edge settings in data. When you use any of the tools, you are setting the smooth data in each affected vertex and the vertex smooth data does not remember which tool has been used. When you try to select hard edges through a tool, the program will check the smooth data of the two vertices of an edge to determine whether the edge is hard or not.
There are 32 smoothing flags. A polygon can hold none or any number of these flags.
In my opinion, if you don't have to, don't use polygon for smoothing control. It is very confusing and tedious.
@steve can't test right now since not at home, but it might not even export the smoothing groups to OBJ and simply just explicitly define the vertex normals.
Like both istonia and i said, smoothing groups are just 1 of multiple methods for working with splits in vertex normals, there not really important in the rendering and are not the only way to store the underlying data.