I first got introduced to blender about 3 years ago, but I never had the time to really devote to it until now. I have the “official blender 2.0 guide” and have been working on some of the tutorials in it, but I seem to be having a consistent problem. My renders all come out looking “lumpy” and very polygony.
I attempted to fix the horrible angularity by hitting the smooth button about 20 times, which resulted in needing to delete some vertices that separated way too much (in that image the halves of the hilt are not actually connected). And then I added some faces back to connect it. The result is a lot less angular, but still very obvious polygons.
they worked for me, seems like your biggest problem is not utilizing the “Set Smooth” button in the Editing panel (F9), for objects with hard edges, also remember to use “Auto Smooth” tweek the degree value to get the desired effect
You might want to try the “set smooth” button (in the edit buttons) rather than “smooth”. Set smooth affects the way the faces are drawn to make things appear to have smooth edges, whereas smooth actually moves vertices around.
This would be a bad idea though, because swords are known for having certain sharp edges. I can understand you’re new (and, by the way, great start!), so if you want to use set smooth I would suggest that you also click the “auto smooth” button so that Blender will only smooth edges that join faces that have sufficiently small differences in their angles.
slipped my mind, it also looks like, in the first render, that you have a whole lot of triangles, this can often be a problem when trying to obtain a clean looking render, not all the time though, preferably it’s nicer to keep things in quads though, for sanity sake
Now that I can see the images . . . it seems you may need to take three steps. First, use SetSmooth, as mentioned below. Second, you should probably convert any triangles to quads (also mentioned below). Finally, if still not satisfied with the results, you may need to add more detail to that mesh.
BTW: The smoothing you’ve done smooths geometry, whereas you want to smooth the face normals. The guard looks better with the sharper edges of the first image.
You say your hilt is in two pieces? connect them. Do that by selecting two vertices’s and hit CTRL + M. Then you won’t get a gap in between. Then hit the ‘set smooth’ button in the editing (F9) menu.
I’m not really sure why it rendered to look like triangles, but they are actually more like kite shapes. it seems to have bisected it for some reason. I attached an image showing the part of the mesh that renders triangular.
I tried the CTRL+M, but since my halves weren’t perfectly lined up, it came out looking rather weird. So I tried lining it up a little better, but it was still kind of mismatched on the seam, so I selected the verts I wanted to connect and scaled them together and removed the extra vert (one pair at a time). It appears to have made them one piece. Did it actually work, or is this an optical illusion?
You might want to try the Edge Split modifier. Use the from angle setting and play around with it. When you select edges and press Ctrl-E and choose Mark Sharp you can use the use marked edges in the modifier. Play around with it. If you don’t like it you can always remove the modifier afterwards.
first let’s look at a mock up of the sword rendered as is, no smoothing or anything
of course, this is unwanted, so now, let’s turn on smooth
now you can see exactly how smoothing applies, but being a sword, we want some rough angles, for the final render, set smooth was applied, and then the Edge Split modifier was used, with “From Edge Angle” turned off, and like musk said, I selected the edges i wanted to be “hard”, used Ctrl-E and clicked “Mark as Sharp”, in the Edge Split modifier, I made sure that “From Marked As Sharp” was the only thing selected, and voila
