Getting weird dark polys on parts of a model (Not flipped Polys)

[Anonymous]

Hey fellas.  I'm modeling some pipes and when I'm exporting to marmoset and substance painter I'm getting weird parts of the model with dark polygons.

On closer inspection these are not shadows or part of any map but an actual part of the model that's just darker than the rest for some reason.

I have individual poly groups assigned but when I tried to assign everything in Max to a single polygroup for troubleshooting the shaded areas appeared in the viewport.

Also rotating the viewport around makes parts of the affected area shade really weird.

Weird shading in the max viewport

The normals all seem fine to me and I've tried flipping and unifying them with the normal modifier as explained here to no avail: https://knowledge.autodesk.com/support/3ds-max/troubleshooting/caas/sfdcarticles/sfdcarticles/Polygo...

I'm including an upload of the file if anyone wants to take a look.

Any help is greatly appreciated as I've been working in Max for close to a decade now and have never seen this.  Ever since I switched to 2018 things feel a bit off.

Thanks!

[Anonymous]

I think Surface's smooth level is high.
Try to apply smooth modifier and then do auto smooth.

Hope this will help 🙂

[CAMedeck]

That odd shading is due to smoothing being forced over the edges.  The shaft is trying to smooth itself with the back of your flange.

It is strange, but I imported your OBJ file and in Element subobject mode of the Editable Poly, I unchecked all the smoothing groups and nothing changed.  But if I added a new Edit Poly modifier, then the smoothing disappeared.

I'm not sure how the smoothing is being applied that you can't seem to disable it as imported, but the previous poster mentioned a Smooth modifier but this does not work.    The only thing I could find so far was adding an Edit Poly modifier to correct the smoothing.

[PropChad]

Your normals are messed up, even though they show correctly within the Editable Mesh. Basically smoothing everything together. Even though you have separate smoothing groups, you have some normals overwriting them. 

Easy fix...hopefully: Apply an Edit Normals modifier (not the Normal modifier), and you'll get some lines coming out of each vertex, basically which direction the normals of the surface are pointing. They are all pointing out from corners instead of out from the surfaces. Select all and click Reset at the bottom. If that doesn't reset them, select all, then Break. Then put a Smooth modifier on top. Check Auto Smooth, with a setting of 45. Prevent Indirect Smoothing made it look a little better on the 4 way piece.

If you still have issues upload the file to be inspected.