I’m new to blender. I’ve been working on creating mods for a game. I’m trying to smooth out some blocky curves in a mesh. I tried subdividing to create more vertices and shaped it accordingly. But the shading get messed up every time I try that. Can anybody suggest a thing or two?
This is mostly caused by flipped normals or bad topology
Can you post a wireframe view of your model?
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First off, thank you for your reply. Regarding the topic, in order to make the surface more curvy, I subdivided the face. That’s how i got this issue with shading.
This image might let you get an idea about what I might have done wrong.
yeah, it seems like a problem with face normals.
Try pressing A, to select everything in edit mode, and then hit Alt+N then ‘Recalculate Outside’
It will try to make every face point outwards. It should fix the problem.
In blender 2.79:
You can also tell blender to show you where the face normals are pointing in the right panel (Hitting ‘N’)
Did you know that we have Blender 2.82 already? 
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I tried that already. The normals seem to be flipped in the right direction. Here is a screenshot of the normals being highlighted. Seems to be okay.
And about the blender version, I’m using it after a long time. And yes, I’m gonna update it to 2.8 soon.
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I tried to replicate your mesh and finally got something that recreates the artifact.
You may have bad closed faces and duplicated vertices
First, hit A to select everything, and try to use Remove Doubles (hit Space bar and search for it in 2.79)
Then look if part of the problem goes away. Then try to manually move the vertices that have bad shadows, they might be disconnected
Specially those vertices:
I don’t see the problem anymore in your last image, btw 
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Tried it. But no luck. It doesn’t seems to have disconnected vertices anymore, but the shading still remains messed up. 
That’s wierd.
What if you upload your .blend file so we can take a look of what’s happening?
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Try checking your normals again now that you’v e merged.
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Sure. I’ve deleted the irrelevant mesh and kept the part I need help with to make it easier for you guys to check.
Website is not letting me upload it here. So I’ve used mediafire.
http://www.mediafire.com/file/my7mtjcgdigs4dr/atsmod.blend/file
I’m just looking at the filenow.
Is there any particular reason you’re using tris instead of quads?
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I think the file I uploaded earlier had some unwanted mesh in it. Now I have re-uploaded it with only the needed mesh. File size is now just around 1 MB now.
And the mesh is from a game file. By default it was on tris.
I’ll grab that new file.
Unless you want those tris becuaew they’re needed for a game, I’d gop without them to make workflow easier.
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I played around with the mesh but I can’t find any way as it is designed to get rid of that problem.
Was it in the original mesh, or did it appear after you made some changes?
If you plan on using a subsurface modifier, it will take that problem away, but you’d have to switch to using quads, which isn’t a big deal if you use the knife tool to cut new edges before you delete the ones that would need to go.
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It appeared after I subdivided some faces. I did it in order to smoothen a curved part further.
If you want, then I can upload the original mesh which has proper shading.
Please do.
atsmodoriginal.blend (1.5 MB)
I hope you can understand where I intended to smooth the curve by increasing the poly count by subdividing the faces.
The bad shadow happenes because you have too many vertices joint together, also, blender’s smooth shading don’t like tris at all
I re made some faces and the problem have gone away
Try to keep things in squares/quads, and try not to joint more than five quad’s edges in one single vertex
If you keep edge loops consistent it can give even better results. However, that’s not performance friendly for games, but since it shades better it can have good look even in low poly. 
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I looked at the original mesh and it’s about as good as you’re going to get, based on it’s geometry.
You could try changing the tris to quads like I explained above, and then shrinkwrap the new mesh onto the original to make sure it forms the same way after editing. You would probably have to subdivide the original mesh further first to make sure it has enough verts to accomodate the shrinkwrapped copy.
Also, if you use a sudsurface mod, it will smooth that all out nicely for you, but you have to make sure your outside edges stay uniformly in place by adding a second edge or using sharp edge or whatever.
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