Hi, see the below image. This mesh has 100k verts with subsurf 1 and it looks all bumpy even though it is smoothed. How can I smooth the mesh without losing detail? Someone’s gotta know how.
[link to .blend was here]
Please provide a .blend. Try to remember that we’re not looking at the file with you. Your mesh might have one problem or several. There’s no way for us to know based on your post.
[link to .blend was here]
[link to .blend was here] sorry about double post.
Your mesh is unfortunately not going to be of much use to you if you’re planning to make highly detailed renders with it. It’s entirely triangulated, and the decimated variety to boot. This essentially means that the topology is unsuitable for subdivision, and that it will never appear smooth to your liking. Normal maps can get lowpoly and/or triangulated assets to look smooth and correctly shaded, but they must be specifically tailored to the given mesh. But even then, lowpoly meshes still run into the terminator problem within Cycles, with or without normal maps. So, if all you have is this obj, your options are:
• Ask the creator to give you a version with clean topology or possibly a normal map
• Retopo the curtains yourself
• Create your own curtains
• Find a more suitable mesh from elsewhere
Here’s a little background video on topology’s effect on subdiv.
Thanks for your detailed reply DerekWatts. This is supposed to be a cloth model, so I actually found the opposite after rendering. The bumpy mesh may look bad in solid view, but after rendering it actually creates an amazing effect making it have very subtle wrinkles. It’s like a super high quality normal map. I know that the mesh is not good for smoothing but I found doing so would actually ruin it!
If you are curious, here is the render.
[ATTACH=CONFIG]475630[/ATTACH]
EDIT: Woah, That is an awesome channel that I didn’t know about, thanks for the link!
I’m glad it worked out after all 
