How to fix normals?

AlienRenders

In DAZ Studio, I'm seeing some polygons that aren't smoothed no matter what I do (on an asset I'm creating). It's only in one specific area. When I export it, I'm getting a vertex normal map in my 3D software. But there is no normal map in the surface in DAZ Studio. I'm fairly certain these are different things, but I wasn't aware DAZ Studio supported vertex normal maps (as opposed to the regular normal maps in the surfaces). I can't seem to find a way to remove these vertex normal maps. The worst part is that vertex normal maps don't respect rotations. So they are forever non smooth. Anyone know how to fix this? Is this related to smoothing groups? My 3D software can't even create vertex normal maps or smoothing groups (except when exporting to FBX, I only use obj).

And just to be clear, nothing in surfaces does anything for this. The smooth button on/off or smoothing angle doesn't do a whole lot. I mean, if you set the smoothing angle to 180, it'll smooth it out, but there's clearly something not working here.

I've tried re-importing and replacing the entire geometry (with no normals or anything) and same results. It's starting to drive me nuts. lol

 

Mada

Try adding SubD and see if that helps? Without seeing the mesh its hard to figure out what's going on - a wireframe screenshot would help a lot :)

FenixPhoenix

In surfaces, there is a setting called angle, I believe. Try dialing that up to see if that helps.

hansolocambo

smoothing groups

3DS Max (Smoothing Groups), Maya (Hard Edges), Blender (Sharp Edges), ZBrush (Creased Edges), etc. enables to control the behavior of edges and/or surfaces. Those tools are seldom compatible from one app to the other. And not from any app to Daz. So you can forget about that. It's only useful in the 3D modeler you made the model with.

If you want a mesh to look perfectly clean in any 3D rendering engine, do NOT count on the normals of your Low Poly (each polygon's orientation). Which is what you're doing with those shoes. Count instead on the normals of the subdivided version of the mesh (aka high poly, sculpted, etc.). That's what baking is for.

Make your LowPoly shoe > Make a nicely smoothed and detailed HighPoly version of it > Retopologize if necessary > Unwrap the final LowPoly > Make a cage out of it > then bake. High Poly polygons' normals (orientation of polygons) will be "converted" as colors in a Normal Map (texture). You load that on your shoes in Daz. And there you go : your faceted polygons disappear because polygons' normals are replaced by a Normal Map coming from another mesh, highly detailled, smoothed and/or sharp where you want it to be.

If your app can't bake, there are free options around. Blender of course. Or HandPlane Baker and XNormal. They are older but still good enough as the tangent space code of Morten S. Mikkelsen (MikkTSpace) remains for more than 10 years the baking normals standard that solved all normal issues with solid AND animated wireframes.

AlienRenders

I figured it out. Since these are using a very different pose than the base pose, there is a lot of deformation when the shoe is placed into the base pose. This is happening where the weight maps of the toes bone and the foot bone meet up. At small rotations from the shoe's toes bend pose (say 0 to 50 degrees), it looks fine and this is all I care about. But the toes are actually bent close to 70 degrees. At that extreme, even small differences in weight map values get exaggerated and you get polygons facing in opposite directions in the base pose. So what this tells me is that DAZ Studio applies the smoothing angle on the original base pose, not the current pose. So I smoothed out the polygons in the base pose best I could with the weight map tool then re-applied the original shape (after fit) with a morph, unfit the shoes, exported that mesh, deleted the morph, and replaced the geometry with the baked mesh. It looks perfect now.