hard surface modeling

[grue1970]

hello.  i know just enough about hard surface modeling to spin out of control quickly 🙂

i have this particular model and i need to increase the geometry to make it smooth, yet i want crisp edges and corners with the extruded parts and beveled parts.

it must be added geometry and not just smoothing groups as this is ultimately going to a 3d printer which does not work with smoothing groups and such.  what i need is subdivided geometry.

i've played around by adding edge loops and horizontally it works well, but vertically it messes up with the roundness of the overall shape.  i've also looked at crease sets with open subdiv, and i might be doing something wrong as that isn't really helping either.

any thoughts as to a good approach of "smoothing" this out by adding geometry?

thanks!

[Anonymous]

Do you want the shaper edges completely crisp or you want the typical small smooth edges (like a small tiny chanfer)

Most of the people prefer that solution (small chamfer) for renders but not sure for printing

[grue1970]

completely crisp might be ideal.  however, at the resolution of the printer a tiny chamfer might get "lost" and appear to be crisp.  and now that you say it, it might be interesting to try with it with small chamfer to see how that turns out.  it's a scale thing.  if i want 8" tall using inches in max i have to make it 200inches tall.  200 inch in max = 200mm in the printer software which is about 8inch ha.  

[grue1970]

so, i'm trying turbosmooth and selecting the edges around the parts i want to be "crisp", setting the crease to 1.0.  that seems to be giving me what i need.

i remember when open subdiv came out with crease sets, and wondered why not just use that crease setting in line sub-object mode.  now i wonder even more although it looks like crease sets can be more manageable on a big item like this, but i wonder why it didn't seem to help when i tried crease sets with open subdiv?  maybe i wasn't selecting the right edges.

i think i will try a stab at the open subdiv and crease sets again to see if i can get similar results. 

attached is a different part of the model and showing areas of sharpness + areas i have not set the crease on in line sub-object.

[Anonymous · Accepted solution]

This is completely crisp that is the most straightforward option

I have added a smooth modifier to smooth angles beyond certain angle only in normalls and then a turbo smooth with the smoothing groups control to avoid smoothing anything is crispy.

Noticed that I have added a single support loop to help stretching in the second edit poly.

There are lots of ways to do this, I simply wanted to point the simpler one.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/n9zitadm83dz7hl/smooth.max?dl=0

[grue1970]

oh wow that's great!  love it!  ok i'm going to give that a go.  nice and simple. thanks!

two other but related:

first, i could not get the same results with crease set and open subdiv as i did with turbosmooth and selecting the lines and setting their crease value.

second, crease set can be used with turbosmooth!  i remember they were both introduced at the same time (open subdiv and crease set) and i had no idea that crease set could be used separately from open subdiv. ha!

EDIT: just downloaded your file, that's fantastically simple!  thanks again!