This may seem like a very simple question, but the issue is that the smoothing of the cone is smoothing the tip, which is not what I want it to do.
I understand why it does smooth it like that, but I'm not sure what's the best way to prevent it from happening.

I created three low-poly cones (38 Triangles each) and a high-poly cone (510 Triangles). Here's a picture of them being rendered in the Unity engine, with a uniform light coming from the same direction as the camera.



Cone A doesn't have any smoothing.
Cone B has smoothing around the whole cone.
Cone C has smoothing on the front, but is hard edged on the side we can't see.
Cone D doesn't have any smoothing, but the amount of triangles make it appear smooth.

Basically what I'm trying it ask is; how do I smooth the 38 triangle cone so that it looks like cone D without adding more triangles?

(Also, I'm using Maya 2011, just in case that's relevant)

Hm...one thing I can think of off the top of my head is having adding an edge loop near the tip and setting those edges to hard edges. Kinda sloppy, but that might work.

Why dont you want it not to be smoothed like B?
If you are adding a normal map from something like D, then the smoothing will work fine as it is (B)

Originally Posted by metalliandy

Why dont you want it not to be smoothed like B?
If you are adding a normal map from something like D, then the smoothing will work fine as it is (B)

It seems like normal baking with that sharp angle is not a good idea... I'll try it today ))

Acegikmo: With regular shading, can't do it unless you addd lots of geo. If you're baking a normal map you're fine with B.

you could make a material for b with a fallof turned to fresnel in the diffuse, thus faking the shadows, maybe?

Alright, I'll try baking a normal map. Thanks for the help!

Don't mean to bump this topic.
I've experimented around with so many different ways to smooth a simple cone.
The best way that I found so far is by adding at least 2 more edge loops to cone B,
One near the top and one near the center.
Regrettably, this method boosts poly counts ( no pun intended) up so much, that its not so economically useful with a high population of cones.

Also the normal map backing trick does not really work so well especially when using custom lighting shader models with custom specular.

Anyone have some special tricks that are not covered in this topic?