Hey everyone, my name's Dayton. I'm new to the Maya forums, and I apologize in advance if I'm posting this in an inappropriate forum.
Anyway, I've finalized my mesh (unless you all have some input regarding changes I might need to make to it) and am attempting to use the Soften/Harden Edges tool to get a nice preview of what it'll look like before I make UVs/Textures. I do this because the model will be used in Unreal Engine 4, and using this tool allows the engine to understand how to distribute lighting across as mesh in real-time.
So, to the issue. I'm currently re-creating this scene from Halo: Combat Evolved:
While working on the mesh, I hadn't discovered any misplaced vertices, faces, etc. It seemed fine and still does, however, when I went to use the aforementioned tool. I found that it started making faces/edges look really dark and janky. Images in order of before ---> after below:
When I started seeing these weird, dark shades all over the mesh, I figured maybe it was the material. Turned it off, and nothing changed. After that, I searched the entire model over twice to find any overlapping verts, n-gons, etc. Nothing appears to be wrong in those contexts, and this has me stumped. I've encountered this before, but it usually was to the aforementioned issues, and in this case, there appear to be none of those.
That said, I also figured maybe it could be my topology, so I wanted to share that here as well:
I'm going to invite @_sebastian_f and @mspeer to this post, a friend recommended I reach out to you both. He said you guys, on separate occasions, have helped him solve a few issues over the course of his involvement on the forums here. All that said, any kind of feedback from anyone would be fantastic; I'd really appreciate it!
Cheers,
Dayton