Max Smoothing groups vrs Maya Hard Edges
polycounter lvl 15
So I have been out of the 3ds Max game for a while due to using Maya at work and now that I am getting back into Max with some personal projects I have run into a snag.
In Maya you can smooth an object and harden specific edges. In Max you assign entire faces to be smooth and separate things by different smoothing groups.
The problem I am running into is if i want to harden just 1 edge on a mesh in Max, that seems impossible. Since everything is done by faces, if I want something to have a hard edge it has to have a different smoothing group, and that is applied to an entire face.
Anyone know how to harden just a single edge in Max? I cant imagine at all that this is impossible.
In Maya you can smooth an object and harden specific edges. In Max you assign entire faces to be smooth and separate things by different smoothing groups.
The problem I am running into is if i want to harden just 1 edge on a mesh in Max, that seems impossible. Since everything is done by faces, if I want something to have a hard edge it has to have a different smoothing group, and that is applied to an entire face.
Anyone know how to harden just a single edge in Max? I cant imagine at all that this is impossible.
Replies
and the two faces sharing the hard edge just one smoothing group (1 or 2)...
emulates the way maya does smoothing in max.
This generates really shitty smoothing groups that causes issues with pipelines that export smoothing groups.
It's really easy to just assign 2 smoothing groups the a selection of polies and then pull one group off of each face on either side of the split.
It dose? thats a shame because it looks awesome
And thanks for the tips guys, tried it out and the 2 smoothing group thing works. Sure eats up a lot of time and effort though compared to the way maya dose things. But I guess thats the price you pay for having saveable smoothing group selections.
3DS Max has some serious shortcomings in the common sense department compared to Maya. I seriously feel like Autodesk has deliberately convoluted the workflow process with many functions and actions in Max, solely for the sake of differentiating the two products, at the expense of practicality.
Just a humble opinion from someone with a Maya background.
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I love the way that maya handles hard edges,its great for baking . but smoothing groups are awesome to HP modeling prototype , just select the faces, give diff smoothing groups, apply a meshsmooth set to smoothing groups and tadaa you have a blockout that you can edit in realtime that will hold well once smoothed again. I cant honestly think of a better and faster way than doing this in any program i tried.
The difference predates Autodesk's acquisition of Maya. Smoothing groups even predate 3ds Max, it was used in the DOS predecessor 3D Studio.