Smooths the selected
polygon mesh by adding divisions to the polygons on the mesh.
Mesh > Smooth > 
TipYou can repeatedly
smooth selected polygonal faces if you keep clicking the Smooth or Apply button
in the options window.
- Subdivision Method
-
Two smoothing methods
are possible:
The Exponential and Linear smoothing
options both smooth equally, but they offer different controls for
the resulting topology. For example, Exponential has
an option to maintain soft and hard edges, while Linear has options
to better control the number of resulting faces.
You can switch between
the two methods after you’ve smoothed by changing the Method attribute
on the polySmoothFace node.
Exponential Controls
The following options
are available when you choose Exponentially as
the Subdivision Method.
- Division levels
-
Use the slider or type a number in the Division levels box
to increase or decrease the number of times Maya performs the smoothing
operation. This also increases or decreases the object’s smoothness.
The Division levels range is from
1 to 4. The higher the value, the smoother the object.
- Continuity
-
The value you enter here determines
the degree of smoothness.
- Smooth UVs
-
Applies the same smoothing
operation to the UVs as to the vertices. Smooth UVs is
on by default, providing better results for UVs.
Turn off Smooth
UVs if you want to maintain compatibility with scenes
created in older versions of Maya, or if the UVs do not need to
be smoothed and you want to improve performance.
- Propagate Edge Hardness
-
Copies the edge hardness
values from any hardened edges on the original mesh to the associated
new edges on the Smooth Mesh preview. The default setting is off.
Map borders
Controls how borders
are smoothed when Smooth UVs is on.
- Do not smooth
-
Borders are not smoothed.
- Smooth internal
-
Internal borders are
smoothed. This is the default setting.
- Smooth all
-
All UV borders are smoothed.
Preserve
Specifies what components
will remain unaffected during the Smooth.
- Geometry borders
-
When turned
on (the default), this option preserves the properties of the border
edges of the mesh. It controls the Keep Border attribute of
the PolySmoothFace node.
- Selection borders
-
When turned on (default),
this option preserves the properties of the edges bordering the selected
and non-selected faces.
- Hard edges
-
Preserves the properties
of any existing manually hardened or softened edges. If you have
changed the hardness or softness of edges (
Normals > Soften Edge or
Normals > Harden Edge),
turn this option on to maintain those settings.
- Tessellation
-
Turn
this option on so that when changes are made to the history nodes,
the smooth node does not redo the tesselation, but just repositions
the generated vertices.
Linear Controls
The following options are
available when you set the Smooth Add Divisions setting
to Linearly. The Linear smoothing
method gives you more control over the number of faces resulting
from the smooth, especially the
Divisions per face attribute.
Do not use the Linear
method on a surface with faces that have more than four edges. The
resulting smooth surface will be uneven. Use
Mesh > Triangulate or
Mesh > Cleanup before
performing the smooth.
- Division levels
-
The number of times Maya
performs smoothing. The higher the value, the smoother the object
and the more faces are generated.
NoteChanging both Division
levels and Divisions per face settings
can create a very large number of faces on the mesh, causing a reduced interactive
performance of the Maya application.
- Divisions per face
-
Increases the number
of faces in smaller increments than Division levels.
Using this option, you can more easily achieve a balance between
smoothness and a low polygon count.
The face count increases
as a result of dividing each face. Maya divides each face by splitting the
existing edges. The value you set is the number of splits Maya performs.
When Divisions per face is set to
1 each edge is split once, a value of 2 will split each edge twice,
and so on.
- Push strength
-
Controls
the overall volume of the resulting smoothed mesh. Higher values
scale the mesh outward while lower values scale it back. The default
setting is 1.
- Roundness
-
Creates
a bulge in the surface by scaling vertices around the center of
the original faces. Higher values scale these vertices outward and
lower values scale them back. For Roundness to
have an effect, Push Strength must be greater than zero.
Note
Mesh > Smooth and
Proxy > Subdiv Proxy each
output the polygon vertex order differently. If you need to perform
operations that require identical topologies, for example, when
using
Blend Shape, you may wish to
use the same smoothing tool for smoothing the polygon meshes to
avoid unexpected results.
