Smoothing issues?

[Harvey Birdman]

Take a look at the image below; it's a cropped piece of the Oasis Mosque image I posted over the weekend. Look at the lighting on the dome - it very obviously shows the polygonal nature of the surface at the light/shadow interface.

This mesh is properly smoothed and all the polys are properly wound - if I render without drawing backfaces all the polys still appear (they aren't wound backwards). I was thinking that I might just create a higher poly version of the model, but on second thought I don't think this will fix the trouble - it may make the sawtooth effect smaller, but it won't fix it.

The specular highlight seems to indicate the use of smoothed normals - the patch is circular and crosses poly boundaries without any deformation. The ambient/diffuse lighting doesn't seem to, though - it behaves as if the normals weren't smoothed, but are perpendicular to the polys.

Is this a bug? Or am I missing something?

[red_planet]

I have had similar problems with spheres imported from external mesh generators. (Wingz and Blender)

Didn't matter how dense the mesh was.

I figured, because it's fairly fundamental, it's a bug.. they'll be aware and will sort it out for the release.

Rgds

Chris

[Oshyan]

We will definitely look into this. The smoothing system is fairly basic at present.

- Oshyan

[sjefen]

I've seen this many times in 3ds max with mental ray. That didn't have anything to do with the models. It was issues with the shadows. Can't remember what it was, but I'll ask around.

[Harvey Birdman]

Well, cool. At least it's not just me.

It's not a showstopper for me at the moment, as I have a lot of code to write, but it might start to crimp my progress if it goes unresolved for too terribly long.

No worries for the time being, though.

[cyphyr]

You could send it over to me (obj or 3ds) and I can see if I can fix it in Lightwave. Looks like a fairly low res mesh, have you tried tippling the polys, or of course you could just delete it and use a TG sphere in its place.
Richard

[Harvey Birdman]

Hey, guy -

Yeah, it's low res because I was hoping to use the same model in real-time. I don't know what you'd be able to do other than increase the poly density of the dome. Like I said, that'll reduce the size of the sawtooths, but it won't eliminate them. A TG2 sphere polys are probably small enough (do they consist of polys or are they built procedurally?) so it'd not be noticable, though - that's not a bad idea for a workaround for the time being.