Currious Questions Thread

ghastlycomic

This thread is like take a penny, leave a penny, except with questions.

Why is it when the edges of a model are disassociated from each other the model has a very low polygon look to it, but when they're welded together the model appears smooth. Are not all the vertex points, edges, and surfaces still in the exact same place?

Richard Haseltine

The preiew and render apply smoothing - they lighten or darken the areas around the edge of the polygon to be closer to the tone of the next polygon. When you split the mesh, or turn smoothing off (as a surface property, not the mesh smoothing) or lower the smoothing angle right down you get the same flat tone across the whole of the polygon. That's why, before we had control of the smoothing angle, hard edges needed to be bevelled or split to avoid ugly artefacts.