Smooth mesh preview.

[haggi]

From the developers network I got the information that it is not possible to get shading information from a smooth  mesh preview. This will be a problem only if multiple shaders are assigned to a mesh and you want to render it with smooth mesh preview.

So there are a few possiblities:
 * ignore the smooth mesh preview completly
 * render the smooth mesh but only with one shader if multiple as assigned

On the user side, he can smooth the mesh before rendering.

So what should I do?

[max45]

I choose:
"render the smooth mesh but only with one shader if multiple as assigned" but print errors in Script Editor

[juang3d]

I don't understand the problem completely... you mean we have to commit the smooth mesh before render? so we loose our old low poly base mesh?

And this leads to another question, do we loose the advantages of OSD?

Cheers.

[haggi]

The only thing which does not work is to get the per face shading information for geometry which is smooted via smoothMeshPreview. That's all.
What I can do is to create the smooth mesh, but only assign one single material.

So if you need smoothMeshPreview with per face shading - you will have to convert the poly geometry into a real smoothed mesh.

[juang3d]

When you mean "per face shading" you mean multiple materials in a single mesh, wich is pretty basic and common, am I right?

Hence this means we will be back to the old times when smoothmeshoreview was just a viewport preview, can't we have it automatically collapsed to a smoothed mesh, in a transparent way to the user?

Is this a Maya SDK limitation or a Corona SDK limitation?

Cheers.

[haggi]

Yes, per face shading means multiple shaders per mesh. This is a Maya SDK limitation.

The question is: Mentalray can do it, but how? I'll ask ADN.

[juang3d]

That is what I was going to tell you, there must be a way, probably pre-collapsing it or something similar, some kind of workaround.

Cheers.

[haggi]

Of course there is always a way. e.g. I could simply duplicate the geometry, smooth it, and remove it later. But any workaround has a significant overhead which I'd like to avoid.

[juang3d]

I Understand that.

There must be a way to achieve this, it's an important thing and the crease workflow with OSD it's a pretty important feature, so they must have a way to do it with mental and other engines, specially now that mental is a plugin as corona is.

Cheers :)

[haggi]

Forget it! Found a solution :)

[juang3d]

Awesome!!!

Cheers.