If youre looking to bake normal maps you should soften all edges on your low res object before baking, but if youre just hoping to make your surface look nice in Maya you will need to manually pick and choose the edges to to soften and harden.įrom the look of your image, you should use the 'Soften/Harden' tool as a starting point and then just tweak individual edges with the soften tool or harden tool till youre happy.ĮDIT - on a second look just using 'soften normals' should fix it (if thats what youre asking), but if its not then try going Mesh Display>Set to Face, and then Mesh display >Soften and it may look a bit better.
Click on the Raylectron toolbar icon to start the process. Select a model of choice from 3D Warehouse (you can download the model used in this tutorial if you wish from the 3D Warehouse ). So the former makes lights bounce sharply off the surface giving the illusion of a faceted surface, and the latter blends the light across the surface, giving a smoother look. Open SketchUp and click the Get Models icon. Harden has the vertex normal visual line being perpendicar to the vertex, and soften has the normals more spread out evenly across the surface. The best way to view what is happening is turning on vertex normals in the display menu and toggle between soften and harden. Soft edges will give the illusion of smoothness where the surface may be faceted.
