Cannot remove strange looking smooth shading

Support Modeling
1

Somewhere during my modeling I have managed to get smooth shading that I cannot get rid of. How do I fix this?
See picture below and my *.blend example here (771.2 KB)

  • Left/Center
    Regardless of flat or smooth shading the object has some sort of “light smooth shading” going on. If I work with the mesh I can get the shading to look a bit different, but that’s about it. The only way to get rid of the smooth shading is to turn off ‘Auto Smooth’, but I want that feature for other (round) elements in my mesh - so this is not a viable workaround.
  • Right
    This is the look I want; smooth shading ON, Auto Smooth ON and hard edges working as intended. Re-building the mesh from scratch solved the problem for this example, so there is no inherent property in the vertices at least. Other than that I am lost.

image
image1763×925 59.2 KB

2

Turn Auto smooth off or lower the angle.
Or just shade flat. No need of any shading on flat surfaces.

3

Thanks, but that does not solve it. I think I was a bit unclear.

  • Shade flat does not work. Regardless of smooth/flat setting there is a sort of “light smooth shading” that I cannot get rid of.
  • Auto smooth is needed because of round geometry in the mesh (not part of my example file).
4

Err… do you need Custom Split Normals Data that seems to be the issue?
Object Data Properties > Geometry Data > Clear Custom Split Normals Data

1 Like
5

That was it! Than you very much.
I must have merged mesh from some imported geometry with custom normal settings.
I had no idea that this was an option but I have encountered this occasionally before when importing meshes - so I am very happy to have finally figured out what is going on.