Problem with smoothing - any alternative?

XoechZ

Hello again! :-)

Currently I am working on some "fantasy armor type" of clothes and this is giving me some headache.

On one side, the armor should flow smoothly around the body which is a perfect task for the smoothing operation. On the other side, the armor has some hard edges, in fact my fantasy armor has many hard edges and spikes around. The problem is that smoothing destroys them completely.
I know that you can select edges before smoothing which should prevent them from being smoothed. But that does not work really good. Of course they are not smoothed that much, but they follow the rest of the mesh and also get destroyed or weakened by this.

So, how is that be done? How can I create meshes that are smooth (curved around the body) where I need it, but also keep all hard edges and spikes?

Any suggestions are welcome. Thanks!

Edit: A function like "only smooth selected polygons" would be perfect. But thats not available in Hex.

Ghostman

You got several options you can play around with. ;-)

JimmyC_2009

Also, in the Vertex Modelling tab, select Edge Around Edge as shown, that will keep the edges sharp. You need to extract the edges as close as possible to the original to make them really sharp.

The cube below has had Smoothing set to '3', and it is still cube like (just to demonstrate. I didn't get the edges really close though, but it has still worked.

cdordoni

JimmyC's suggestion works fine in many cases.

You can also use "dissociate", which breaks your mesh at the selected vertices. You might run into other issues with this, like messing up your UV map.

XoechZ

Thanks for all your input!

This gives me a lot of options to try out. I will see what works best for me.