So I’ve been playing around with a bunch of different options to smooth out this object, and am at a loss. What are my options for smoothing out this model, and is what I want to do even possible? (Also, I’m modelling this for 3d printing so I assume shade smooth and whatnot won’t be of use for me)
And when I use the smooth modifier, it starts to distort my shape away from what I want.
Is there a way to smooth things out locally? Or along certain faces / edges of a shape? What I’m worried about is those hard edges showing up in the final 3d print.
We do not know what the actual mesh looks like.
You cannot just slap on a subsurf and expect perfect results. Your model needs to be all quads and the polygon flow should match the shapes of the object for best results. The result you are seeing is generally from using some faces with 4 sides
i think sub surface is the correct way to go. i guess you already know that you can toggle between flat and smooth surface when you are in object view, so other than that, go for sub surface.
woaao… never mind i didnt even read through the whole thread, i just thought you wanted a way to smooth the mesh without sub surface…
sorry, well ye i had this problem a few times myself, and its usually cause you use Bev edge and subsurface together.
try to swich their positions and see if that helps.
Finalbarrage, it seemed to do it to my mesh with or without bevel. I only used bevel because subserf was wonky.
Thanks for the tips so far, my knowledge of subserf is definitely limited…ie zero.
Subsurf works best with quad based topology, that is faces with four sides only. You have large n-gons, faces with many more than 4 sides, which the subsurf modifier cannot subdivide predictably. Fix the mesh and subsurf will work perfectly.
The fastest way to fix it would be to delete those big n-gons, switch to Edge Select, select all but the two edges at either end of the shape and hit Ctrl-F>Grid Fill.
This isn’t a particularly weird shape. Grid fill will fail on really weird concave shapes unless you do it in small pieces. The real issue here is that quad topology is necessary when planning to use subsurf.
