Smoothing - a noob question

[voon]

There is something I don't understand with smoothing:

- If I have it on a very simple mesh, say a simple cubeshapet designer table, it looks bad (sort of like the underlying imaginary mesh was a sphere or so) ... there I guess it's better to disable it so you have the sharp shape of the cube as desired

- On complex meshes, say a high poly sofa cushion, i want it enabled, so I don't have visible polys, but a seemingly smooth natural cloth

But what happens if I have both, sharing the same material? A face with a cube balancing on its nose? Are you forced to then use two materials of the same time, once with and once without smoothing?

[profbetis]

If you are working in a plugin, you can usually explicitly disable smoothing for certain faces of a mesh. (Maybe this stays when you export! But be sure to look for an 'export smoothing groups' option)

If you don't want to or can't do this, an alternative is to duplicate the final material node, turn off smoothing, and reconnect the rest of the nodes so that they share all their connections and only the smoothing option is different.

[steveps3]

Not sure why you would want a table and a cushion to be sharing a material anyway