I bought some assets which were created in 3DS Max. I am making low-poly game assets; I use Face ‘Smooth’ shading along with the Edge Split modifier with hard edges marked, which generally seems to get the approximate results I want for my assets.
I have the following issue with smoothing of the imported assets (Blender version 2.78a):
When I make a modification to an imported model’s mesh and apply ‘Smooth’ shading to a face it seems to be mixing the Blender smoothing groups with the 3DS Max smoothing groups, creating weird shading artifacts.
After having spent days trying work-arounds and searching for solutions, to no avail, I have come to the assumption that the models exported from 3DS Max have smoothing groups applied that Blender must import as smoothing group data that is different/separated from Blender’s smoothing group data.
The only approach that has worked in (almost) fixing this is out-right deleting the affected faces and re-creating them; of course, the issue with doing this is that I have to re-UV map the newly created faces (which is not productive).
Here is an example of the issue on a simple shotgun shell mesh:
I have checked to ensure the direction of vert/edge/face normals are the same between the original import and the modified version, as well as ensuring there are no duplicate verts/edges/faces; this leaves me stumped as to why re-creating the faces would somehow fix the issue (other than if it is some separated import smoothing group data that is being stored for the original faces).
If it is separated import smoothing group data - does anyone know how to work around that (or clear the imported smoothing data on specific faces affected)? I am at the point of feeling like my only practical/productive workflow solution for modifying models exported from other tools is having to use Maya or 3DS Max (which, I want to stress, I would prefer not to as Blender is a great tool that works for my projects in every other way, and is much kinder to my wallet).
I also noticed that using the Edge Split modifier or setting the imported mesh to ‘Flat’ shading has no effect; I first have to set the imported mesh to ‘Smooth’ shading, where edge split modifier will then take effect and setting to ‘Flat’ shading will actually make it shade as ‘Flat’.
Side question - if you noticed, the smoothing looks better from the imported version compared to the smoothing done to the re-created faces; is there a way to get smoothing looking as good without increasing poly count? I’ve spent hours on trying to replicate the same smoothing without subdivisions but can’t seem to get it looking as good/clean.