No I don’t have a reading problem, I’ve discovered a cool new trick and I call it Smoothmesh.
It pretty much allows you to apply a meshsmooth (pre-nurms style) without increasing your poly count and I’ve found it to be very useful from time to time.
All you do is add 2 Relax Modifiers to your stack, the bottom one has a positive Relax Value (I usually kick it up to 1.0) the top one a negative Relax value (-1.0). And now start increasing the Iterations, but make sure that both Modifiers Iterations are the same. To see the changes in on-the-fly you can wire the iterations together. You’ll see that the mesh get’s relaxed then “counter-relaxed”, this has the effect of smoothing out hard edges. I have found, however, that when the iterations go past 15 the mesh starts to bug out, so just be careful about that.
I hope someone can find this useful, I’ve learned so much here that I decided to give a little back.
:buttrock:
That’s interesting, thanks for sharing. A friend showed me a similar trick, that makes brain/cloud shapes… use Noise, then Push, then Relax, tweak a bit and…
Here is an example shot. Please excuse the bad model, it was a deadline job and it was only gonna be a few pixels in size, but it serves well as an example
Hmm. I’m curioous how different the results would look if instead of tesselating you just added Meshsmooth to it. Maybe with a Push modifier to restore volume.
The reason why I tessallated then Smootmeshed was just to make a viable example, ie. there are a whole bunch of co-planar faces which get smoothed out.
The idea of Smoothmesh is to simulate meshsmooth without adding topology.