Shader fixing

[Sushi]

Because all good things come in threes, here’s a tutorial on shader fixes for FL by Sovereign

Step 1: Finding the problem areas and knowing the software.

You can see the how messy the Hutt ship’s smoothed surface is. Angles that should apear to be sharp are rounded over and it generally looks messy.
I put some green boxes around them so you can spot them if they are not apparent.

In your menu you can go to customize -> viewport configuration to get to that menu I have open. You can change between smooth, and facet shaded to get an idea of what you are working on. Ignoring backfacing for the most part will help, I use it most of the time but change back and forth.

Step 2: Selecting the faces.

Now, you don’t want to cut every face apart. You want some smoothing on the model if it has rounded edges. This one does, so we can select the whole surface we want rounded instead of selecting every other face. Any selected face that shares a vertex with another face will be smooth shaded together. Since we don’t want any of our sharp angles (80-100 degrees) shaded in this case, we will select everything around them.

Hold ctrl key to keep previous selection and left click each face. You can drag and left click, but it may select faces you didn’t intend to select so be careful when dragging selection.

(For this pic I didn’t do a total selection of everything I wanted to separate, just a bit as an example.)

Step 3: Detaching the faces.

I selected everything I wanted to detach, and then I simply hit the detach button and put those faces in a separate group. Because they are now in a different group they don’t share the same vertexes and no longer smooth. You can see the difference right away.

Closing:

Pretty much every model needs some face separation. Very simple ones tend to be fine but wherever a round object meets a sharp angle smoothing takes over in a way not intended. You can generally get away with only separating the most offensive faces from a model but a perfectionist like me or Dev goes overboard cutting them all. :lol:

The texturing helps hide the bad smoothing shading a lot, but it’s not always enough as seen in some of the extremely bad cases like the early ISD.

[cheeseontoast]

Nice tut tho i usually tend to just stick to using the smooth modifier and/or going to the faces and making sure all the polygons near it only have 4 sides… else they dont reder correctly in max.