please add hard edges to the model improvements II in forecast.

having no hard edges for models really sucks!



it already is annoying to split vertices (or adding a lot of additional intermediate polygons) in the modeling application but what makes it even worse is that you will get open meshes which don't work for stencil shadows. yes, you can use closed lod models but i just found out that they don't follow bone animations (ent_bonemove,...). i have to look for a workaround again... <edit> it works with an invisible model that casts the shadow and does the same animations per script... this is no nice workflow! </edit>

yes this would be usefull..but the best way to do it is to add smooth group support from a modelling prog like max. or alternatively you could set the smoothing groups in MED..Either way, this would be a useful feature.

yes, my vote, but not use the ugly smoothing groups.

I thik, was is better can put the smoot in the edge (how in maya )

Quote:

---

If you use Max, Polygon normals are defined by face not edge, Its hard to describe...

---

you can get a better explication of system diferenci here:
http://www.cgtalk.com/showthread.php?t=200101&highlight=smoothing+groups

setting edges hard/soft directly (like in maya or wings3d) is much nicer workflow-wise than smoothing groups like in 3dsmax or milkshape.

i don't mind what method gets implemented for 3dgs though. probably jcl would implement smoothing groups because there is no edge structure in the model format.

hard/soft edges can be converted to smoothing groups by an exporter quite easily (by continuously doing flood fills with hard edges as boundary). converting the other way around should be easy too.

i forgot to mention a different method. instead of storing the normals per vertex, the normals simply could be part of the triangle struct.

so you would have a list of normals (like the list of uvs) and triangles would store 3 additional indices like that:

vertex1 vertex2 vertex3 uv1 uv2 uv3 normal1 normal2 normal3 material

i think this would be the best and simplest method...

Yes, hard edges would be very useful. I'm very much in favour of it.

I wanna vote again for smoothing groups in model improvements II

I reported this same thing earlier and gave a way of doing this. I too vote for this as I suggested it a short while earlier.

Edit: My request from this thread has the solution to get hard edges, but it will affect the entire model rather than mixing the two. It's a rather simple shader and I've had this request for nearly a month now and the thread died. I've given the technique and method to doing it and it should work on shader model 1.x.

i think it also would be enough to simply provide a threshold angle for smoothing in materials. not as flexible as arbitrary hard edges or smoothing groups but good enough for most cases.

but there has to be some solution for this!

how will this work with arbitrary level geometry imported into wed (once that will be supported)? with level geometry it would be even more problematic if it only could be completely smooth or hard shaded.

signed!