Turbosmooth and Mesh Smooth modifiers

During the modeling process, smoothing is one of the unavoidable steps in order to achieve a high quality final product. There are many ways and options that can be used in 3ds max in order to achieve smoothness. It also depends whether you wanted to create a high-poly or a low-poly mesh.

For high-poly quality, there are two types of modifiers that you can use. Those are TURBOSMOOTH and MESH SMOOTH. As for low-poly quality, you can use and manipulate the smoothing groups of the mesh and adding edge-loops where needed, in order to achieve smoothness. The reason why I prefer not to use both TURBOSMOOTH and MESH SMOOTH modifier on low-poly intended mesh is because both modifiers does not only boost up the smoothness, they also boost up your poly counts tremendously depending on the iteration level of the modifiers.

Below is a test conducted on a single plane in order to see how the poly-counts is being boosted by each modifiers. First ,we will use TURBOSMOOTH modifier on the plane below.

The plane currently have only 2 tris and 2 polys (I thought it should be 1 poly).From here, we apply the TURBOSMOOTH modifier on the plane.

With iterations set to 1, it changes the poly-counts from 2 to 8. Lets continue by changing the iteration to 2,3 and 4.

When Iterations=2  , poly-counts changed from 8 to 32.

When Iterations=3  , poly-counts changed from 32 to 128.

When Iterations=4  , poly-counts changed from 128 to 512.

Next, lets have a look at the MESH SMOOTH modifier effects on the same plane. Again, starting from a single plane with 2 tris and 2 polys, we apply the MESH SMOOTH modifier.

With MESH SMOOTH modifier iterations set to 1, the poly-count changed from 2 to 4.

When Iterations=2 , poly-counts changed from 4 to 16.

When Iterations=3  , poly-counts changed from 16 to 64.

When Iterations=4  , poly-counts changed from 64 to 256.

                With the above test, we know that TURBOSMOOTH multiplies the poly-count of the mesh more compared to MESH SMOOTH modifier. Since both modifiers have their own settings and ways for smoothing the mesh, we cannot say that it is better off using MESH SMOOTH than TURBOSMOOTH by just conducting the above tests. As we can see, for MESH SMOOTH we can choose between three types of subdivision methods which are NURMS, Quad output and classic. Most of the time I used NURMS .

Based on the beginner’s note from autodesk,

NURMS Produces Non-Uniform Rational MeshSmooth object (NURMS for short). The Strength and Relax smoothing parameters are unavailable with the NURMS type.

A NURMS object is similar to a NURBS object in that you can set different weights for each control vertex. You can further control the object’s shape by changing edge weights. See Display/Weighting group, following,       for further information on changing weights.

Classic Produces three- and four-sided facets. (This is the same as applying MeshSmooth in version 2.x without turning on Quad Output.)

Quad Output Produces only four-sided facets (assuming you don’t look at the hidden edges, since the object is still made up of triangular faces). If you apply this with default parameters to a whole object, like a box, it’s topologically exactly the same as Tessellate, edge-style. However, rather than using tension to project face and edge vertices out of the mesh, use the MeshSmooth Strength to relax the original vertices and the new edge vertices into the mesh.

Next we will look onto the effect of both modifiers on complex mesh.

1 Comment

Comments RSS TrackBack Identifier URI