Yeah, I was wondering just how exactly it worked, in terms of whether clicking the smooth button more than once would solve anything. I remember reading here at one point that it would (AS might have said it). Anyway, yeah, this is my situation: I have this model in Wings. It can be either about 50k+ faces or 125k. I went with 125k and consequently almost deathkneeled my poor Dell laptop because I hate unsmoothed models and Bryce wouldn't do the job properly. I just tried importing a simple 16+2 face cylinder, for instance, and despite the edges being less visible, the fact that there were 16 of them still showed. Zo... is there a solution I'm not aware of? drac

Well, drac, I am with you on the unsmoothed model thing. I made my third wings model ever earlier this evening. Just a simple column with insets. It has 7K polys. Because I am a smoothing freak.

What I did do, though, was smooth only PARTS of the model. I imported it into Bryce, looked at the areas that were polygonal, then smoothed those. Sure, some verts weren't connected to other verts, but it still LOOKS ok. At least, to me.

This is what I know about it:

I heard that bryce internally converts all the polygons into curved surfaces ( that's why OBJ models do not need smoothing, if they have enough of them)!

I do not know does wings have OBJ export, but that would be the way to go, if it does...

Anyways, 7000 polygons is sometimes not enough for a closup renders like that, i would rather go with double more then that, but even 7000 with a good choice of texture should render those poly-edges invisible ! :)

Sometimes, changing smoothing angle helps too...

Hope I helped some :)

Message edited on: 08/06/2004 06:21

Kemal: yes, Wings do export in .obj format

try doing a merge-vertices thing on your object.. most of the "sharp edges" are caused by split vertices and bryce would probably take it for separate pieces (like how poser does) and not smooth it.. I always merge my vertices and bryce smooths it all out as far as I know, but then again, I'm a bryce newbie so this is just my ha-penny opinion lol Dru

It's probably the smoothing angle. Anyhow I doubt it's split verices, because Wings' winged edge topology doesn't normally do that. (With maybe the exception of separate material groupings or extracted/cut objects.) Maybe a pic of the model mesh and the render would make it easier to figure out what's going on.

Just like fog and haze Bryce smoothing angles are much more than you need. You should never need more than the maximum default. Here's a render of a 20sided column with several smoothing angles. After about 90 degrees you are adding more distortion than you are taking away. Clicking on the smooth button twice does not add to the settings. If it's set at 10 degrees you get ten degrees no matter how many times you click.

Shape and polys matter. Here is the same 20 side and the bryce buckeyball. The 20 sided column is done at about 20 degrees. The buckeyball is still not a sphere at a 90 degree angle but the column is starting to distort. If you want curves from few polys you have to smooth more. If you have simpler shapes in the same model leave the mesh objects seperate so you can apply different angles.

Yeah, well, this is what I'm talking about. Smoothing only the joints won't save more than 15k faces in my reckoning. And it's already up to 175 atm while it's rendering. I think it's about 12mb as an .obj export from Wings :) drac (ornlu for wings)

What you're taking about here is 2 different types of smoothing - Smooth Surface Subdivisions, which adds polygons and "curve" them along the existing curve and a renderer trick called smooth normals. Bryce, as well as most 3D (except Poser), uses this render trick. Without normals, illumination that is parallel to the plane of the polygon gets zero illumination and illumination that is perpendicular to the poly gets max illumination. If you plot angle vs illumination, you get a straight line and that's what makes a low poly count object look faceted. A normals list looks at the whole surface and tricks the renderer by making the angel vs illumination graph a curve instead of a line. This gives a smooth effect that lets you use about half the number of polygons to create a smooth looking surface. The problem is that normals do not effect shadows (both cast and received) and for some angles there is no realistic normals smoothing solution. That's what the smoothing angle in Bryce is for - it does not control how "round" an object is but the threshold where Bryce stops smoothing. The default of 85 degrees means anything over 85 does not get smoothed. This means that you don't get smoothing on the 90 degree angles of a cube (for which there's no good normals solution anyway). In many cases (like inorganic models) you may want to set the angle to less then 45 degrees so that 45 degree angles are "crisp". While the .OBJ format can (and usually does) support a normals list, 3DS and DXF do not. Bryce doesn't convert imported objects to smooth surfaces but it does triangulate square polygons and then recalculates the normals - which sometimes causes the object to look different then in it's original quadratic form. So if you're modeling an object for Bryce, triangulating the object in your modeler will not only look more like it will in Bryce but it will also greatly speed up import times. HTH; Dan

So Bryce likes tris... Hmmm... takes note

thanks for that Dan :)

A little late chiming in on this, but: I've been exporting from Wings as obj. When an object is imported from Wings into Bryce sometimes (sometimes) you can get a better look when the object is lower poly by first Unsmoothing the object, then Smoothing it. I don't know why this works, and it doesn't work with all objects, but it's worth a try if you haven't tried it yet.

tjohn, it's got 175000 polys. if i unsmooth it, smoothing it back WILL deathkneel the comp. =/ Drac

Ouch.

Bryce smoothing only affects how light is applied to the surfaces. I should also mention that it affects textures and reflections. If you try to smooth a reflective material you get distorted reflections.