Can Reality Factory do soft and hard normals?

[GMer]

Been a while since I've been on here ^^
Does Reality Factory have the ability to distinguish hard and soft normals?

[QuestOfDreams]

I don't know exactly what you mean by hard and soft normals but actors can have smoothed faces - level geometry can't.

[GMer]

A soft normal is when an edge has an appearance of smoothness, a hard normal has a sharp, crisp look. Here is an example of what I'm talking about:



"soft" and "hard" normals are the terms used in the Unreal 2 engine. Don't know what else they could be called, but a rose by any other name does smell as sweet, no?

'Tis a good thing I guess, because in my game the bsp geometry will be used for collisions (and invisible) and I'll be using static entity proxies for looks.

[Veleran]

He means that when you smooth two and more faces you choose angle amount to be reached for the smoothing to take effect.That smooth box to the left in the pic must have a smoothing group of 100 degrees,
and the right one-the sharp box uses a smoothing group of under 90 degrees.

Make a test,and if its not like that,then assign a different group to the sharp angled groups .
You can also clear the smoothing groups and dont use smoothing at all if the quads are planar (flat).

[GMer]

I don't know where gmax hides that function, but I found a similar way to do it by applying a mesh smooth modifier to the entire thing, then breaking the vertices where I want the edge to be "hard". I'll try exporting it to RF later today... Have some shopping to do

[Veleran]

The meshes editable mesh or edit mesh modifier surface properties at the bottom have some buttons for applying various smoothing groups.
Dont break the vertices and mess the model and vertex count.
Look at the top right to the modifier list-there s an edit mesh to the box.


At the second pic there are the smoothing groups of the editable mesh surface.
You can also select by smoothing group the faces.

Example-the inside of the mouth is smoothing group 1 and 2 together,and the rest main model is smoothing group 1.








If you apply the edit mesh modifier this allows you to undo any changes you made by cutting (deleting) the modifier from the stack and return to the starting box.

And,you can select faces or vertices and go as it is in the sub object mode,and add a modifier to the object.
This way the modification is applied only to the selected faces.

When i vertex edit boxes to use as bsp collision i just clear all smoothing groups and have the objects faced.

[GMer]

I did not know that. Can't wait to try it.
I see you are using Windows XP Veleran, Good choice

[paradoxnj]

Try exporting it and see what happens. I'd be interested to see as well.