Mesh Smoothing
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Mesh Smoothing
cosmo71
Posts: 3,609
Well mesh smoothing is a great thing with one exception if I turn mesh smoothing "on" to smooth some edges because of the pose unfortunatelly nipples got lost also. I have to change the limits and raise the values to whatever just so have small nipples on the figure. Is there a way to smooth just parts of the bodymesh and not everything? Means smoothing legs and arms and hips is good, smoothing breasts not.
Post edited by cosmo71 on
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what, don't use mesh smooth on the figure. Just use sub-d. Mesh smooth is really best for clothes because it does lose detail when smoothing.
Even then I don't use it anymore. It messes with details too much. I don't remember it being so aggressive in past DAZ Studio releases.
I remember back in 4.0 the common default was 20 smoothing iterations...frankly glad they toned it down. Most of the time smoothing causes me no issues, but I haven't used it on a character much because it really will change the shape too much. It's not needed on the human figures because of sub-d.
That was the settings some products were released with. That should clue you in on the fact that it wasn't as aggressive as it is now.
Nah, that changed long time ago. The 20 was a very short lived thing. I don't have any proof it's more agressive now, a setting of 2 still looks and behaves like it has for me at least. Occasionally I turn it up a bit, but not s much.
When you say more aggresive now, what time frame do you mean? I haven't seen any changes in the last several iterations of Daz studio. I have both 4.6 and 4.8 installed right now.
It smooths way too much. It wasn't like that before when 4 first came out. Something has changed, I don't know what, but it has. I used to use a lot. I don't even consider it now. For poke throughs I have stuck with deformers.
I wonder, have any of you used smoothing with custom values in the Surfaces Smooth/Angle settings? If so, has that had any effect on the smoothing?
thats not the same as mesh smoothing. mesh smoothing doesn't have anything to do with that stuff.
It does manipulate the mesh (ie, edges). So I am thinking it can counter some of the effects of the smoothing maybe it helps to keep it from distorting the clothing, for example, when applied.
i am fairly certain that is only visual stuff and not geometry. the surface tab settings. ..lots of tools have smoothing for surfaces that is just impacting render and not geometry. Kinda like how bumps don't impact geometry, but displacement does.
Quick testing doesn't show any geometry changes. however I could be wrong
I use it a lot when importing objects, like Ships. Many times the values on those settings are about 87 and this is too much, at those values edges are too rounded. So it must be doing something to those meshes.
EDIT: OK finally got it to work. My stuff is too organic for this to have an issue. When you said ship it made me hunt down some more geometric items. Interesting.
Seems like over 90 causes issues, but below 90 is fine for a cube anyway. I need to tinker with more objects though to find out how it all plays out.
I normally wouldn't use smoothing on a ship though. So I would agree smoothing modifier on a ship wouldn't work so nice. Just like I wouldn't add it to a human.
Regarding the surfaces smoothing, the default of 89.5 or whatever is OK on a cube, keeping it angular. I think I would need another primiative with more sides to see how smoothing would impact it differently. Off to hex i go.
OK Bingo. I can see the smoothing angle impact the mesh if it fits the right conditions. it needs to have just the right density and shape where the smooth angles can impact the visuals. However, inorder for it to actually change the shape of the mesh, it has to be pretty dense at the edges and the setting needs to be high.
It can impact the shading of a flat textured object that doesn't meet the requirements above, but the mesh doesn't change.
From my limited tinkering, with humans and clothes its pretty hard to see the a change in this setting, even if they aren't textured. it's because of the sub-d, curvature of the figure and the density. If you turn off sub-d this setting is apparent on flat textured objects, but not sure it impacts mesh smoothing. I don't have pokethrough issues so I don't have something to test with in that regard.
however turning this smoothing setting up and down on the base figure didn't seem to impact the clothing above it.
It was just for one pose.
There are poses you can need mesh smoothing for body parts
What level of sub-d are you using? Bump the sub-d from 1 to 2. 3 if you are using HD morphs.
Sub-D preserves the shape much better than smoothing does.
Before I got used to upping the sub-d level, I did use smoothing. But once I got used to Sub-D i never smooth people out, it changes their features too much.
Not in every case, I know what SubD does, have used it on V4 and also I know what mesh smoothing does, have also used it on V4 so, the question was if it is possible in some way to use mesh smoothing just for bodyparts and not for the whole body.
Simple answer on that one...no. It affects the entire mesh or none of it.
Not sure what V4 has to do with it but keep in mind she starts at 4X the geometry of a genesis figure. So one level of sub-d is like 2 levels of sub-d on a genesis figure. So where 1 level may have been a lot for her, 2 levels for a genesis figure is just getting you on equal footing. So 2 levels of sub-d shouldn't give you issues if you did any sub-d to vickie.
In external programs you can smooth select faces, however you often get an obvious seam showing where you did it. The Geometry editing tools don't allow for that in Daz studio (to my knowledge)
okay, thank you :)
I used it for the first time when getting the morph smoothed out of the No-Suit image I posted; I did some adjustment morphs but had to use the smoothe; ended up using a differnet cameral angle and postition; so it can have it's uses but yeh subd is better. Only exception might be when trying to get it to render and use less memory by reducing subd? Presuming that would work?
Setting it to base shape matching instead of general smoothing will keep the details somewhat more intact. It's really a double edged sword.
yes it is...sometime you have to decide what is more important smoothing on a bodypart or details on another :(
I generally only apply smoothing to a body if I'm doing something funky, like having body parts flow over objects with collision. ;)
Hush, i left that out for a reason. We go dangerous places too fast :) often enough its the other way around for me though, i'll make the seat cushion collide so i don't have to make a squish morph for the seat. sometimes works well enough.
Really, the only time I turn Smoothing above 5 or so iterations anymore is when a clothing item is fitted to an extreme morph it doesn't have an actual morph for... or occasionally for extreme poses.
Yay smoothing!
That what I did when I used it. I kept those setting under 7. Using higher numbers tended to make things worse.
dem areolae.