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FS2004 GMax Smooth Modifier

Andrea80

Andrea80

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163
Country
italy
Hi all,
I have a question, I've tried to find if someone has already asked in the forum, but I've found nothing.

When applying the Smooth modifier to a Poly object you can lower the poly count while maintaining a nice curved surface.

The question is: does the Smooth modifier have any impact on the Frame rate inside the simulator?

Thanks for the help,

Andrea
 
Hey Andrea,

There are two versions of Smooth in Gmax; Smooth and Mesh Smooth.

Mesh Smooth can increase Polygons in various ways, or just do a full 100% smooth over all of the objects surface.

Smooth will only do surface appearance smoothing, but can be veried in the amount of smoothing. It also has smoothing groups, so an object can have flat surfaces here, rounded looking surfaces there, etc. Very unique.

Now, with Mesh Smooth, if you add more Polygons, you add more sophistication to the model. So far, we found that mainly 'textures' and gauges are slowing down planes in FS, not the mesh sophistication. A 1/2 million polygon plane (with smooth instrumentation and lite graphics) runs perfectly fine in FSX/P3D.

One thing we found is that a part that is smoothed all over (regular Smooth) will have the lowest amount of Vertices, while a part that has zero Smoothing on it, each triangle has its own set of Vertices, so if a cube has 8 total 'actual' Vertices, fully smoothed, in-game, it will have 8 Vertices, and zero smoothing, it will have 24 Vertices (one set per face, 4 Vertices each side).



Thats about it.


Bill
 
Note however, that the rules for an AI aircraft are different. You then want to keep polygons as low as possible, and use smoothing to cover that up.

Hope this helps,
 
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