Ambiera ForumDiscussions, Help and Support. |
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Hello. Is there a way to smooth geometry, such as when using one of the cylinder or sphere objects? Thanks. |
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While creating the mesh , you can specify the poly count... Maybe It is available for sphere only... |
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Yes, I know I can adjust the poly count. It's not just for the sphere, but also for the cylinder and cone (how many sides determines how many polygons). But that's not what I am talking about. I am talking about applying smoothing. This smooths at or below a certain angle so that lighting/shadows do not show edges (where polygonal faces meet). Create a cylinder with, say, 24 sides. Put in a light source. Instead of the cylinder looking smooth, you can see the flat faces and edges in many places. This is due to lack of smoothing. Several engines have the ability to apply smoothing and you set the angle for when smoothing is applied. So, if you set it to 30 degrees, then 90 degree angles would still be nice and sharp (for example), but anything with less than 30 degrees would be smoothed visually. Adding more polygonal faces is not the answer as it has the potential to really slow down a game engine, especially one like CopperCube, which is based on some older tech. Let's say I wanted to create smooth columns/pillars and need many for a great hall or some such. If I have 100 pillars with 24 faces each, that's 4800 tri-faces (not counting the top and bottom of each pillar). If I need them smoother, then upping the polygonal count drastically increases the number of faces the engine needs to deal with. And you'd still end up being able to see the edges. |
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I have been playing with smoothing normals last few days - its an issue with CopperCube for sure - especially when you add in normal maps as will really show up lack of smoothing then. I found most important was NOT to use CopperCubes inbuilt plugin - "smooth normals and tangents" as makes everything much worse for rounded edges. For squarish objects after heavy decimation in Blender may look better in those cases. Next if you have a mesh with broken and uneven lighting when moving a point light past the mesh (ie blocky light changes) then you need to recalculate normals (only) with nothing else selected - this will fix a lot of lighting/shading problems actually. If still no good then open in Blender and Recalculate Normals in edit mode then apply Smooth Shading to that part. I found this fixed one object up quite well..although it doesnt always work for some reason. If only CopperCubes default 'Smooth normals and tangents' would work better.... |
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thanks a lot for the blender tip @Robo, I wasn't aware of that. I always use the inbuilt recalculate normal and tangent with the option improved smoothing checked... I will try the blender smoothing trick. |
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thanks 'just_in_case'. I just found another BUG in CopperCube related to this topic: Some meshes will never be fully corrected using 'Recalculate normals' under the 'Recalculate tangents and binormals' in CopperCube. To fix you need to scale the object like 100 times the expected size then 'freeze scale and normalise normals' then when you run the 'Recalculate normals' will now fully work due to bigger size somehow....weird but true....see for yourself when you get partially fixed shading with gaps not quite right... Super weird but at this for 2 days now and this only fixed it....hah ! |
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This is a major problem in CopperCube - especially when applying normal textures - any faults in shading really show up then. Best method overall by far is to load into Blender and smooth shade the item (2.7 - spacebar / type 'smooth shading' or 2.8 - right click shade smooth BUT remove any auto smoothing under Normals (triangle icon right hand side options) and then will work). Blender does a nice job of smoothing the normals and best left untouched in CopprCube unless you heavily decimate the item then basic CC smoothing may be needed. The previous post is correct when you can use CopperCube - just once fixed decrease the size again back to normal. |
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