Shade Smooth Issue in 4.1

Mart1n71

I've just updated my Blender to v4.1 from 3.5 and I'm seeing some odd behaviour on shade smooth. When I right click and select shade smooth the mesh appears all lumpy, where as in 3.5 it was nice and smooth. Selecting Sculpt Mode makes it all smooth as per 3.5, but going back to object or edit mode makes everying look lumpy again.

Padone

You can check for sharp edges in edit mode, that are new in 4.1. Or be sure that "keep sharp edges" is disabled when you apply shade smooth.

Mart1n71

No, I tried that, plus various options in the new Shade Smooth By Angle option.

therealragingonion

I'm having the same issue. I usually don't have to smooth shade the model when I import via Wavefront, as I assume shading data is carried over (I'll have to review that now). However, if I do any light sculpting on the mesh, it's breaking the smooth surface and auto-smooth is just making everything worse. The only solution I've found is to add a sub surface modifier, set to Catmull-Clark, with the Smooth by Angle modifier placed after it. This isn't going to go well on higher detail models if I have to sub-divide an already heavy mesh just to be able to make minor modifications.

hardwire666

Just a thought but I would play with the rendering settings for the view port. Looks a lot like Ambient Occlusion errors that happen when the settings are cranked. Could also be 1000000% wrong. Like I said just a thought.

therealragingonion

So I think I've found the fix for this. When you import a model, go into edit mode and select the entire model. Then, in the toolbar at the top, select "Mesh" and then "Normals" (You can also just use the hotkey Alt+N to bring up the "Normals" menu). Under the "Normals" menu, select "Reset Vectors." Then exit edit mode and enable "Shade Smooth." I've tested this on a model imported with no subdivisions and a model with 2 subdivisions and both are being smoothed as expected, even with the "Smooth by Angle" modifier enabled. It seems that Blender's smoothing operation is no longer able to properly render the mesh normal data that's being imported from Daz. I'm not sure if you're using Diffeomorphic but if you happen to use the Out-of-Box export options in Daz, you can uncheck the "Write Normals" option in the export menu to skip having to reset vectors in Blender every time you import a model.

Padone

Unless there's custom normals you want to keep for some low resolution meshes, usually you don't export/import normals, especially for figures since normals are recomputed anyway for deformations. What I mean is just don't import normals, if this is the issue.

Mart1n71

Thanks a lot guys. It turns out it was having the calculate normals ticked when exporting from Daz that was causing the issue, since unchecking that box things have been looking much smoother.