Hi guys, in the attachment you can see my problem. I’m assembling a weapon out of different parts.

When I use the TurboSmooth modifier I get artifacts that you can see in the upper red rectangle of the second picture. Is this due to the former welding process that I used or is it just a geometry issue?

Furthermore I get a shape that`s supposed to be a nice ‘round’ surface. Probably it’s just putting in some more vertecies? (second picture, lower rectangle)

For better understanding I attached the before and after pics with mesh turned on.

	Attachment

	Attachment

bad geometry for games.  take the bottom cylinder pieces and extrude them, then planar flatten them. if you have bad geometry going into a game engine it will not import correctly. plus your model the way it is would be a real pain to texture and u have unneeded geometry

	Attachment

	Attachment

	Attachment

	Attachment

Thank you very much for your detailed example. I will alter my geometry that way.
So do you think smoothing is even a good way for models being imported to games? Or does it make to complex geometry?

regards

you can usually hide rigid geometry with decent texture maps.  i would just model all curved geometry with splines(arc spline) then use the -sweep- modifier to give the spline smooth geometry. then you can attach the geometry you made with the spline, which would be your blade and you could attatch the hilt to the blade or use them separately grouped together how you originally wanted.  I know that’s a crapy explanation but it should make sense.

thats very much true textures hide whats underneath it. you can include normal mapping in that also

Turbosmooth is a modifier which runs a series of algorithms over your 3D Model to sub-divide and smooth the model out. To avoid unwanted results you need to understand what it is doing and how to setup your model so that it will look how you want it to look after the Turbsmooth modifier has been applied.

The key is to make sure all vertices have edges connected to them (see difference between BAD and GOOD). Control Points <= is a term used when adding additional edges simply to assist holding the shape of your 3D Model after the turbosmooth modifier has been applied. The more Control Points you add the sharper and closer your edges will look.

Hope this helps!

Intel i7-2630QM @ 2.00GHz || 8GB RAM || nVidia GeForce GT 555M
Microsoft Windows 7 Enterprise - Service Pack 1 (64-bit)
Autodesk 3dsMax 2013 - Product Update 6 (64-bit)

	Attachment

Thanks guys for all your replies!

@Blakestone Good explanation of yours on the turbo-smooth modifier that helps a lot!

I recently saw a video tutorial on the texturing (including normal maps) in a combination
of 3ds max and MudBox. So you’re able to ‘hide’ deatail in your textures.

I’ll try that as well! For those of you who are interested I add the link to the Youtube-Channel.

	Video

This set of tutorials has a similar situation in focus:
http://cg.tutsplus.com/series/creating-the-iphone-4s/

Enjoy

Hardware:
Intel Core i7-860@ 2.93GHz - 12 GB Ram - Nvidia GeForce GTX 560 TI 2GB RAM
Software:
Windows 8 Pro 64bit Max2013

Working with max since Max 1.2
Main work area:
Games, real time graphics, Interface graphics, video.