Shading of shallow cone?

How do I get Blender to shade a very shallow cone to that the faces are smooth shaded, but the central point is sharp?

The options I’ve found so far only allow all smooth (which shades it like a shallow spherical section) or all flat. I can’t seem to get the combination of smooth faces and a defined central vertex.

Pic shows the spherical effect and the vertex I want pointy.


Subdivide those radial edges, delete the central vertex, and bring the newly formed ring to the deleted vertex position.

So does it have to stay as a ring, or can it then be merged into one central vertex again?

What Ovn is saying is that you need to tighten the mesh at the central point(pole). By tightening he means adding close loop cuts right near the center. This way when subsurf is used you will retain a sharp point in the center while the rest is smooth. To answer your question the easiest thing to do would be (after a couple very tight loop extrusions in the center) to just merge the verts. You will wind up with a bunch of tris around the center (just like a uv sphere) this is usually fine for this topology. If you want to can turn those tris into quads by selecting 2 adjacent tris and hitting f. You keep going around fixing them. If your loops contain a number of verts equal to a power of 2 (8,16,32) you have some other options, but honestly it’s not needed here.

Also, if you merged the vertices, you’d return to square one…

Ok cool, I’ll play around with that. I don’t want the extra polys in the finished model (game asset) but may be able to use the better shading for baking onto a skin.

Yeah that’s what I thought. :smiley:

If that’s an game asset you are better off using baked from high poly normalmap imho.

Ok. Another thing to learn…

Turns out that the normal map won’t be any good for me. The game in question doesn’t allow any way of using normal maps. All the skins are just bog basic 2d images, with no extra tricks.

Not a problem. I’ll just go back to the original plan of basically screenshotting the high poly geometry for the lower poly asset skin.