[Eric Lagman]

I have a model that has some crease sharp edges similar to a gemstone. The model came from solidworks through moi as quad mesh and into cinema for uv unwrapping. The model renders fine in cinema and the edges stay crisp where need and look smooth in the smooth areas, but when I render in maxwell or open in studio the sharp edges become very soft. Is there a way around this? as a workaround I lowered the smoothing in studio from 60 to 10 and hit recalculate, and it looks much better. The triangles become a little visible though in the smooth areas now because of this. I also tried playing with the phong anlge in cinema and it helped some. Do I just need to add more polygons to my model? I suppose I could have exported from moi as large amount of triangles instead of quads, but I am not sure how easy it would be to unwrap the uvs in bodypaint with a triangulated mesh. Any ideas. The other plugins seem to give you what you see in the native app viewport when it comes to rendered geometry (ie solidworks/rhino).

[macray]

is there a normal-tag in Cinema involved? try getting rid of it and then setting the phong angle again. maybe this help.?

[Eric Lagman]

I tried setting ignore normals on the maxwell object tag, and no difference.

[jc4d]

Try to optimize the points in your model, maybe there is some disconnected somewhere.

Cheers
JC

[Eric Lagman]

I got it to work by exporting out of MOI as triangles and cranking up the subdivision fairly high so that there was enough geometry in those areas. Now it works fine. There is always something weird with the quads that come out of MOI. They look good as long as you dont try to do anything with them other than straight up render in Cinema 4d using cinemas built in render.

Edit. I can double confirm it was something about the quads from MOI causing the problem. Exported from moi as triangles everything looks as it should, and seems to uv unwrap fine in C4D. If anyone minds taking a look at the attached quad model from MOI maybe they can give me some tips as to why the sharp edge details in the center come out soft in maxwell. Its most noticable in the two striped cutout details near the circular button hole on the model. Maybe I need to run it through riptide obj plugin for cinema instead of straight up file open obj?

[JDHill]

Well, at least, I can tell you that the creases come out soft due to the default angle on the phong tag; setting it to something more like 15° allows the creases to remain unsmoothed, but it's a touchy number, due to the contours of the overall shape of the object.

[Eric Lagman]

Well, at least, I can tell you that the creases come out soft due to the default angle on the phong tag; setting it to something more like 15° allows the creases to remain unsmoothed, but it's a touchy number, due to the contours of the overall shape of the object.

Thanks for taking a look jd. I found the same thing by trial and error. Seems to work best though if I just output from MOI as triangles and give it a fairly high resolution so it has plenty of geometry in those areas. When I did this I could leave the phong values at their default.