©2012 Rich Diamant http://www.rd3d.com | Home

ESmooth:

ESmooth is a different take on the traditional Maya Smooth. The "E" in ESmooth stands for Edge. This is because ESmooth takes your hard and soft edges into account. Basically ESmooth will try and keep the shape of any edges which are hard while doing a traditional smooth on the edges which are soft. This gives a "bevel" look to your model without the need of doing an actual bevel. This will allow you to work on a much lower cage to get your shape while utilizing ESmooth when needed for the final result. This allows for a fast and iterative workflow for hard surface modeling.

There are two buttons to take a look at with ESmooth. The first will apply the ESmooth to a model while the second will remove the ESmooth on the model.

There is also a Tightness value. Default is set to Medium. Differences will be shown below.

NOTE: ESmooth is non destructive. What this means is a separate model will be created with zero history on it. This is intentional. This allows recovery of models on accidental history deletes where all you would be left with is the high poly model and no way to get back to your original mesh. This is done by make a connection to the original object behind the scenes. This means at any point you can click remove ESmooth and your original mesh will be there. Be careful not to go randomly deleting nodes that you are un aware of in the hypergraph. The connection is made through the message property of the newly created mesh. This workflow also means that all history will be kept on the original mesh if all history is not deleted.

Limitations: If you move your high res mesh after you ESmoothed the mesh and then remove the ESmooth, the transforms will not be applied to the low res mesh. This means it will be in a separate location. You also cannot skin either the high res mesh or low res mesh and expect the skinning to maintain once ESmooth is added or removed.

WorkFlow: You do not need to be in object mode to apply the ESmooth. You can be working in component mode and still work. However, any tool you are in will be reset to Maya's standard tool. This is unavoidable at the current time. Use hard edges to define where you want to maintain shape and soft edges where you want a round feel to the mesh. The closer supporting edges are to the hard edges the tigher your "Bevel" look will be.

Example:

Mesh before any smooth applied

Mesh after ESmooth

Tightness Controls:

<-- Previous | Next-->