Hard edges in Wings 3D

arrowhead42

Hi everyone,

Seems that wings3D is an outdated piece of software, but I use it because I'm very familiar with it. However, hard vs soft edges seems to be causing me quite a bit of heartach and I'm hoping someone can help me.

I'm modeling a simple cylinder, and notice the dark, shadowy edges on it. Seems that somewhere a long time ago I read somewhere that Wings does this because the edges are soft and I need to change them to "Hard" by using the hardness command and choosing "hard" from the subsequent menu . But when doing so, soft, smooth curves suddenly do't look so soft amd smooth. I rid myself of the shadowy appearance, but curves now have distinct lines on them, rather than a nice, smooth round cylinder for example. Please see the attached pic with before on the left and after on the right. I see other 3D models people have made, which don't seem to have this problem. Is this a quirky issue with Wings itself? or is there something I can do to eliminate the sahdows AND the lines?

andya_b341b7c5f5

I can't talk specifically about this in Wings3D as I don't use it, but the 'problem' is common to other 3D modelers, like Blender.

The 'shadows' are caused by the shading algorithm trying to smooth the appearance of the edges of the model but, not having much geometry to work with, it gets poor results.  When you tell the program that edges are 'hard', it no longer tries to smooth them and the 'shadows' disappear.

I assume you want the edges around the top and bottom of the cylinder to be sharp and the vertical edges to appear smooth.  Perhaps Wings will allow you to select individual edges and make them 'hard' or 'smooth'?  Your pictures suggest all the edges have been marked as one or the other.

The problem with that approach is that if/when you export the model e.g. to use in Daz Studio, those edge attributes may not be preserved.  So, you may want to add some more geometry to give the shading algorithm more to work with, and in a way that will be preserved on export.  For example, add a bevel to the top and bottom edge loops: the 'tighter' the bevel, the sharper the angle will appear.  This should deal with the 'shadows' on the sides. 

To make the top/bottom faces appear flat when using smooth shading, you could add an edge loop around the top just inside the existing top/bottom edge loop.  If the top/bottom face is an N-gon, you will probably need to replace this with triangles or quads to do this, or delete the N-gon then extrude the existing top edge inwards a small amount before filling in the remaining hole.

Richard Haseltine

Addng an edge loop is oen option, another is to SubD the model and then weght the top edges to keep them sharp - DS supports that, and I used to be able to export a model from modo and have it load with the edge weights in place (still had to convert to SubD to see the effect) - unfortunately modo no longer seems to export the weights in the older version I have (they don't even survive a modo->modo round trip, it isn't a DS bug).

arrowhead42

Ok, thanks for the advice. The actual model I'm having the issue with is the area around the doors on a hot rod, but it was just easier to show the problem on a simply cylinder. However, I went ahead and opened the hot rod model and selected the edges of the doors, where the door panel and car body panel meet and I "hardened" only those edges and that did it! It'll be painstaking to go and do that with every edge, but if that's what I have to do, then I will.

As for some of the other things you mentioned, I hate to ask and sound naive, but I'm just a part-time hobbyist who does this stuff for fun, and thus some terminology is foreign to me. Can you explain to me what are

edge loops, N-gons and edge weights? If it'll help me expand my capabilities, I'd love to learn

Padone

arrowhead42_f7de82070f said:

edge loops, N-gons and edge weights?

Wings LOL .. you got me 20 years back when I used to play with Nendo. As for edge loops etc you really can't model sds without knowing that stuff, and it's explained in the wings manual too so take a look at it. Also a good documentation on sds modeling is in the Silo pages. The main issue with Wings is that it's a manifold modeler so you can't have free surfaces.

As for a good way to deal with hard edges I'd go with adding extra loops as @Richard suggested. This is always exported fine and works with any sds implementation. Also it makes better reflections with most rendering engines so it's a win win.

http://www.wings3d.com/?page_id=252

https://nevercenter.com/silo3d/wiki/index.php?title=Nevercenter_3D_Modeling_Wiki

I was always fascinated by the elegance of sds modeling and how much you can achieve with it. Below there's a old model of mine I did with Lightwave back then. She's a toon character featuring a quite good anatomy with a very low poly count, that's the magic of sds.