edge split or edge crease?

Hi all, I’ve been practicing with splitting faces and edge creasing for smoothing out only parts of a mesh… With edge creasing for really defined edges you need some loopcuts but with the advantage that you dont loose the connection between vertices. With splitting the vertices do separate and you get the same effect visually. My question is: when should I use splitting or crease? are they the same for refining sharp parts?

BTW, you can merge vertices on different split pieces if they share the same vertex-pair position with remove doubles.

Hi,

I recently addressed this question in this tutorial on my blog:

http://feeblemind.tuxfamily.org/dotclear/index.php/2007/08/13/88-how-to-solve-blenders-smoothing-problems

Most of the time, you’d prefer use EdgeSplit because:

  • marking/clearing sharp edges is easy (while adjusting indivudal creases can quickly become cumbersome, already with light/medium complexity meshes)

  • you don’t add extra-geometry (a few more loops can matter, polycount-wise)

  • because it’s cool! :slight_smile:

Of course, it also depend on the kind of object you are modeling, and what the tools your are more familiar with.

Hope this helps

thanks a lot, im reading your tutorial right now, its very clear. I think its less work and cleaner to have a split modifier on selected(sharped) edges than going edge by edge checking every crease value… and you dont need more loop cuts to refine an edge… So I choose split modifier by now. Thank you.