NURMS causing straight edge to cave inwards

[aimee_cordero]

I am trying to use NURMS to smooth my model which has created satisfying results except for one area, where the model develops an extruding lip. The edge on this lip is straight, but when nurms is tuned on it distorts in an awkward way and creates a lip no matter how I scale back the edges. I have attempted scaling back several different loops and the whole bevel together but for some reason that pointed edge remains.

[RobH2]

Maybe NURMS is not the right tool to use for what you are trying to do. There is no 'one way' to achieve most tasks in Max. Maybe Turbosmooth or Meshsmooth with some support edges would work better?

But, can you upload the file? I'd like to look at it and see how if behaves for me. I might be able to help. 

[aimee_cordero]

Yes, I've attached the file here. Thanks! I tried Turbosmooth with similar results, but have not tried anything else.

[RobH2 · Accepted solution]

I'm returning this to you. Open it and look it over, turn modifiers on and off and see what I did. 

Your main issue is that you had poles (vertices where 4 or 5 edges meet) and 'Meshsmooth' does not like that. You need pure quads if you want to smooth angled edges. I remodeld a bit of it to show you. Then, you need some support loops to help hold the geometry from collapsing. You can make edge loops using 'Swift Loop' from the 'Edit Poly' toolbox. Google that and/or look it up in the Max Documentation if you don't know what it is. It's very handy. 

You can see that if you remodel and make sure you have quads at the corners that are bending down and you add support loops, you can get a nice smoothing. It takes practice to get to the point where you know what else to try when you get lost and the first thing you try doesn't work. Google is your friend often in that case, as well as this forum. 

Another thing you can do in this case is use the 'Quadrify Mesh' modifier. It will make all the triangles into quads, then you can 'Meshsmooth' that. I made a copy off to the side and did that on it so you can see. You might want to cut the decorations off of the top and have them separate if this smooths them too much. If they are separate you can control them independently. 

I hope this helps. 

[RobH2]

Here's a shot of the smoothed models. They look pretty good now. 

[aimee_cordero]

This helps a lot, thank you for the in depth response. I can see how these changes make a drastic difference, I will keep all this in mind for my modeling, thank you!

[RobH2]

Glad to help. Over the past few years there has been a common feeling that everything should always be modeled in 4-sided polygons. I guess that's because a lot of the tools work nicely with them. You can use triangle faces if you control the topology of your model and get fantastic results as well, but you just have to model so that they don't cause issues. So you don't have to have 4-sided polys everywhere, but make sure you have them were the surface changes direction so that smoothing works better. And actually, those 4-sided polys are still triangles. You just don't see the edge in the middle. 

Now that I've said that, none of it is gospel. There are so many ways to model and get great results. With experience, you'll figure them out. And there sort of is no right and no wrong. Whatever works for you project, is the right thing. Obviously, if doing games or things where processing speed is critical, there are right and wrong ways  if you  want to optimize. But for a single file, that will just get rendered, just do what works and get paid and keep going. As you get better you'll automatically develop better and better techniques and habits.