Smooth Material .. how to tell it which edges are sharp?
Posted: Thu Oct 27, 2016 1:25 am
I'm not sure if this is a Blender Octane or general Octane question: When I use a smooth material on a simple cube, we get the result nobody wants, i.e. spherical shading on a flat cube. So you take smooth away and all is fine.
But what do you do on mixed shapes? What about a piece of 90 degree bent metal (see image), where you only want the inner and outer round part smoothly shaded, but every flat surface (quad shaped arms and the top/bottom of each curvature element) to remain flatly shaded ... as it would look in reality? I.e. all edges are "sharp"/"hard", but the vertical edges in the curve elements are soft?
Is there a way the Octane understands the sharp edges you can define in Blender? Or can octane not handle this at all and the only solution is two materials, one smooth, one not (which I guess would cause issues at the edges those materials touch still)?
And another observation I'm not sure why this happens:
If the material is "smooth" ... the flat surfaces obviously look crap. But why is there this sharp shadowing "error" in the middle of the bent part?
But what do you do on mixed shapes? What about a piece of 90 degree bent metal (see image), where you only want the inner and outer round part smoothly shaded, but every flat surface (quad shaped arms and the top/bottom of each curvature element) to remain flatly shaded ... as it would look in reality? I.e. all edges are "sharp"/"hard", but the vertical edges in the curve elements are soft?
Is there a way the Octane understands the sharp edges you can define in Blender? Or can octane not handle this at all and the only solution is two materials, one smooth, one not (which I guess would cause issues at the edges those materials touch still)?
And another observation I'm not sure why this happens:
If the material is "smooth" ... the flat surfaces obviously look crap. But why is there this sharp shadowing "error" in the middle of the bent part?