Smooth shading poor tiling

Quick question: I am modeling a guard rail, and when I have “flat” shading enabled everything looks OK. However, when I enable “smooth” shading, the guard rail looks like the following:

http://i51.tinypic.com/10ppovk.jpg

Obviously you can see that the tiling of the texture looks very poor. I made a tileable texture, so that when flat shading is enabled the seams are not visible.

I am relatively unfamiliar with texturing. All I have applied is a diffuse map (no bump / spec).

What can I do do solve this problem when smooth shading is enabled (other than “use flat shading”).

Thank you!

That’s because of those faces in each side of the model
http://i.imgur.com/yK9g9.jpg

that lead into
http://i.imgur.com/Qz6xr.jpg

If you remove them
http://i.imgur.com/3KtnY.jpg

Then the shading will be
http://i.imgur.com/7H463.jpg

You have problem with interpolated normals, check them in edit mode.

Thank you sanctuary for the detailed response!

That solved my problem :slight_smile: