Hello- I’m still pretty new to modelling and still have some fundamentals to learn.
When I shade smooth this mesh, creases appear on what is otherwise a flat surface (with all vertices falling on the same plane). I don’t know why that is, and it’s persisted through resetting normal vectors.
This was constructed with quads extruded from an initial plane to form the desired outline, then Solidified & Beveled with modifiers.
If I shade flat the issue goes away, but then I don’t get the smooth edges for the internal cutout and border. I also presume this issue is caused by some misunderstanding of hard surface modelling that I have, and would prefer to solve that rather than rely on the flat shading setting.
So- what’s leading to the creases, and how can I model to avoid them? Existing mesh here:
Have you noticed yet that every crease is where there is an Ngon (face with more than 5 Vertices)?
Super fast fix - Add a Weighted Normal Modifier.
More technical method. Select all of one side and do a small inset. There may be a wee bit of overlap to untangle. This makes almost all the Ngons into Quads. AND it pushes those creases into the small inset so they almost vanish.
Easy way to select all of one side - go into face select mode, select one face and Select Menu > Select Similar > Coplanar. Note the Shift-G hotkey. Note that this menu changes if you are in Vertex or edge select.
I’m designing assets for eventual use in a game engine. If there are issues with the mesh I’d prefer to resolve them rather than relying on Blender’s shading approaches.
Is my mesh alright and I’m safe to use the Weighted Normal modifier while working in Blender just to tidy up the appearance, with it performing as expected later in a game engine? Or are there aspects of the mesh that are leading to this that I could improve with some work?
And then you select a blender specific modifier as solution ?? And also keep the thread alive after this ??
Anyway: if this is for a game engine anyway then you might conisder to “outline” the sillhuette for better beveling and even delete the inner edge loop like so:
BTW, most game engines support custom normals. So if you use Blender’s Weighted Normal modifier, that should be able to be baked into the exported FBX and read by Unity or Unreal. Just make sure Apply Modifiers is enabled (it is by default).
