Smooth trim edges possible?

[goldmember]

I seemed to fly thru the learning process until I came to trimming.

No matter how high I take the tesselation values, I can never get a trimmed surface to match the curve smoothly, always leaves jagged edges, someone suggested setting adv. Tesselation to 20 on U & V, that made no difference, I set it to 100, still no difference.

This has really crumpled my love for this seemingly great application.

I have bulit around 20 models & almost all of them were prematurely abandoned due to these problems, I have searched the world for a solution, but everything turns up bare, cant seem to find any tutorial covering this.

Am I the only one?

I thought I found heaven in Maya, please help me.

[joojaa]

Yes its possible... The edge jaggedness is because on rendertime your edge gets converted to triangles and you just dont make enough of them. Increase tesselation values. Some seem to think its a precision issue it isnt! Or it is kindoff but you wouldnt se this unless youd be very close and even then setting the precision values to 0.0000000000001 helps (yeah you ca type values beyond what the slider gives you possibility)

A good trick to get better tesselation is to turn edge smooth on a value of 0.999 (maximum shame alias), but since thats maximum theres nothing you can go beyond. Unless you trick maya into thinking your object is bigger. Freeze transforms for all surfaces, deete history group, scale up by 1000, freeze transforms scale back down (now dont delete the history of this or freeze this goup or youll loose the benefit). Soul look prettier... I have an extensive explanasion at works since tesselation seems to be such HARd issue to people.

Or if using mental ray set the tesselation override to spatial fine length 0.5 and check view dependent.

Trust me it isnt!

[goldmember]

Thanks for your post Joojaa, I have played around with tesselation, Edge Smoth & tollerance settings on the fillet tool but cant seem to find the magic settings to take away the jagged seams, Someone else told me it is vital that there is matching tangency on the surfaces to be filleted, is this so?, makes it quite a bit harder if that is the case.

I will try the other things u mentioned, thx again.

[joojaa]

bah bushit, it doesent matter bacuse theres still going to be a visible change in curvature a multipix filter should do it close enough.

Did you try the scale up down method or the mentalray override! (i cant make a demo scene just now). It should help in 99% of cases!

The mantalray setting should show if your tolerance is too big! (micropoly teselation you se) As i said you wont have luck unless you know what you do!

The scale thing basicaly allows me to put the edge smooth to aparenet renge of 0.999999. But you se if you dont know what sliders to pull it wont much help some sliders need to be waaay out there while some need to be pulled down etc etc.

Its not hard ist just hmm different!

id put images but our webdisk is full again... maybe on monday!

[goldmember]

Ok, I attempted the scale-up/down but it didnt seem to make any difference

Steps taken:
1) Load model
2) Freeze Trans
3) Delete History
4) scale X,Y,Z (1000)
5) Freeze Trans
6) scale X,Y,Z (0.001)

The object does not appear to be any different at all.

did I do something wrong?

[joojaa]

Dooh, sorry not in wievprt but at rendertime ONLY (make sure the edge smooth is on!). Your render settings wont affect wievports unless you ennable show render tesselation!

[goldmember]

Well, if you are sure there is a way I'll keep hammering at it.

Just curious as to what Alias would suggest to avoid this.

I am going to create a new model to test on to ensure default settings throughout. then I will try these techniques some more.

Once again, Thank you for your help.

[goldmember]

After some more playing I've made some steps forward

MentalRay output on default settings seems perfect in some cases, no broken geometry at all.

I thought MentalRay was maybe for specific object types, like glass. Can it be used to replace the Software Renderer completely?

also, I managed to get Software mode unbroken, using the following settings:

No Curvature Check (Dont think this matters too much)
Edge Smooth (0.999)

But this only worked on a few models where the loft was taken from a curve on surface or trim edge, but if I intersect a cylinder or lofted surface into a plane, fillet them & trim from the filleted curve on surface, it doesnt seem to work & even if I bump up the tesselation to a stupid amount it still remains broken.