Hi! Trying to make some sort of a cliff top, but it needs to be useful for import to an old game. Ain’t the first model I made, but it’s the first organic thing, and here my lack of knowledge in modelling gives me a headache on several things. To start it off here’s a picture:
When SetSmooth is on (and how it’ll look in the game) I have these black shadowing along the edges. Normals are all normal (although I did recalculate them to make sure), and I checked for double or out of place vertices, and these were the only issues googled led me to, and both is fine on my model. Is there any other way to get rid of these shadows? It’s not as visible once I slap the texture on, but it’s just as bad in-game, especially when I start positioning lights around the scene and they break on these places.
One thing I suspect could be the culprit is the fact that there are some really sharp, narrow triangle-shaped faces on the model, which pulls another question. If bad modelling is the problem how exactly do I structure edges to not get these? If you don’t quite know what I mean I can provide a wireframed picture too.
Where would you recommend me to go to read up on what is a good structure of a model? It’s one of the main problems for an inexperienced user like me when I build a model, I know what shape I want, but I never know what’s the smartest way to properly, and economically, vertex wise, position the vertices, if you know what I mean.
The problem is that Blender is trying to make sharp angles look smooth. If you make those angles less sharp in the geometry they’ll smooth better in the viewport and render. That means adding edges/vertices.
Hm I thought I get this, but I’m still experiencing issues. So the first mesh I did was a total mess, now I tried to make a smarter layout, and this is the result:
On the bottom half of the image you can see that I don’t have any sharp corners in any of these faces, but I’m still getting this shadowing when I turn SetSmooth on, and it can look even worse than in the picture under some angles. So what gives?
I don’t know, some shots in the dark here - maybe either try to give it yet more detail, such as subsurf, or try making sure the faces are more planar?
If by “good structure of a model” you mean topology, I know that we have some great tutorials on the subject stickied on blenderartists right here.
I didn’t thoroughly test it under all conditions, but in the game, with texture on these aren’t visible at all. But I’m using this under the water where there’s a dense fog effect going on, and I didn’t try to expose it to lights yet, I’ll see how that works.
That’s what I meant, and I even saw that topic, and I even know about REtopology technique after sculpting, I just had no idea what “topology” exactly means. Thanks a lot, I’ll spend some time there.
Here’s another related question, thus no new topic, don’t want to spam with those. So I’ve been looking at other game objects’ wireframes, and this still slightly confuses me.
I just cooked up a very simple model, and it has, what appears like very simple and clean topology to me. The moment I turn Set Smooth on it looks atrocious, and even shows an edge in the middle of those rectangles in the middle, even though there are no edges through their diagonals. I’ve seen models used in actual games that have way sharper points than these, and similarly long and narrow rectangles, so what’s up?
I even made sharper corners than these without the mesh looking this messed up, and yep, it’s recalculated, and I checked for doubles (not that it would happen with a mesh as simple as this lol).
Should I simply ignore the set smooth button? Problem is, shouldn’t it get smoothed at some point? I’ve heard about some game engines doing this automatically. Older game I fool around with doesn’t, and all edges on a model look ugly unless I import with Set Smooth on (actually, every single edge between every face looks horrible on organic models without this thing on)? Or is this topology still not good, and in that case what do I do? Isn’t this already too much for something as simple as a plank? How do other models get away with much messier topology?
Thanks a lot, I’ll spend some time there. 
