The simple answer, unfortunately, is to experiment. If you want a sharp join between two areas, put the two in different smoothing groups. If you want a smooth transition, keep them together.
Hmm, maybe an example makes it easier - here's the front of my Tau-style gun. The one on top has no smoothing groups assigned, and you can see it doesn't look right at all. It would be much better if the grooves had sharp edges, and the disc part stood out some more too.
The bottom version uses just two smoothing groups - the model is assigned to group one by default, and I then selected the faces that make up the grooves in the gun and the disc and the faces that seperate the disc from the body (it is slightly sunk in, as you can see in the bottom picture) and just assigned them to group two. A very simple thing to do, but it vastly improves the look of the model.
Hope this helps a wee bit. If not, there's always #nsmodelling.
Comments
Hmm, maybe an example makes it easier - here's the front of my Tau-style gun. The one on top has no smoothing groups assigned, and you can see it doesn't look right at all. It would be much better if the grooves had sharp edges, and the disc part stood out some more too.
The bottom version uses just two smoothing groups - the model is assigned to group one by default, and I then selected the faces that make up the grooves in the gun and the disc and the faces that seperate the disc from the body (it is slightly sunk in, as you can see in the bottom picture) and just assigned them to group two. A very simple thing to do, but it vastly improves the look of the model.
Hope this helps a wee bit. If not, there's always #nsmodelling.
i can get my pistol 20-30 poly under what they can, with a different modeling style.
i'm BOX (not mob) modeling in MS3D... everyone thinks it's a big no-no... but so far, nothing is beyond me.
p.s hows the gun going maus? done yet? <!--emo&:D--><img src='http://www.unknownworlds.com/forums/html/emoticons/biggrin.gif' border='0' style='vertical-align:middle' alt='biggrin.gif'><!--endemo--> <!--emo&:D--><img src='http://www.unknownworlds.com/forums/html/emoticons/biggrin.gif' border='0' style='vertical-align:middle' alt='biggrin.gif'><!--endemo--> <!--emo&:D--><img src='http://www.unknownworlds.com/forums/html/emoticons/biggrin.gif' border='0' style='vertical-align:middle' alt='biggrin.gif'><!--endemo-->