As I'm new to POVRAY as well as WINGS3d, I did a simple export of a simple cube
in wings3d to povray. The result is very dissappointing since diagonal shades
appear (clearly due to the tesselation by the forming of the mesh2 object).
When I omit to transfer normals everything is fine, but I want to transfer a
finer mesh and I don't want the small triangles to be visible.
Any suggestions what I could do about it?

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nimda schrieb:
> As I'm new to POVRAY as well as WINGS3d, I did a simple export of a simple cube
> in wings3d to povray. The result is very dissappointing since diagonal shades
> appear (clearly due to the tesselation by the forming of the mesh2 object).
> When I omit to transfer normals everything is fine, but I want to transfer a
> finer mesh and I don't want the small triangles to be visible.
> Any suggestions what I could do about it?

Wings3D allows you to define edges which should be exempt from smoothing.

In Wings3D, select the whole object, and in the context menu choose 
"Auto Smooth", then export again.

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clipka <ano### [at] anonymousorg> wrote:
> nimda schrieb:
> > As I'm new to POVRAY as well as WINGS3d, I did a simple export of a simple cube
> > in wings3d to povray. The result is very dissappointing since diagonal shades
> > appear (clearly due to the tesselation by the forming of the mesh2 object).
> > When I omit to transfer normals everything is fine, but I want to transfer a
> > finer mesh and I don't want the small triangles to be visible.
> > Any suggestions what I could do about it?
>
> Wings3D allows you to define edges which should be exempt from smoothing.
>
> In Wings3D, select the whole object, and in the context menu choose
> "Auto Smooth", then export again.

That worked perfectly. As I saw the word crease angle I immediately thought
about the same notion in VRML. Interpolation between normals is only done if
the angle is smaller than this value, so if it is too small, the drastic change
in direction of the normals at the edges and the vertices is too big, giving all
those nasty shadows. To check if it was really that, I put the crease angle back
to zero, but to no avail, I have to recreate the cube. Anyway this helps me a
lot, thanks.

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"nimda" <nomail@nomail> wrote:
> That worked perfectly. As I saw the word crease angle I immediately thought
> about the same notion in VRML. Interpolation between normals is only done if
> the angle is smaller than this value, so if it is too small, the drastic change
> in direction of the normals at the edges and the vertices is too big, giving all
> those nasty shadows. To check if it was really that, I put the crease angle back
> to zero, but to no avail, I have to recreate the cube. Anyway this helps me a
> lot, thanks.

As he said, you can also manually set the edge hardness.  If you select edges,
you can go to 'hardness' in the menu and select either 'hard' or 'soft'.  Then
you don't have to worry about tolerances.  It also affects smoothing, which is
very useful.

 - Ricky

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nimda schrieb:
> That worked perfectly. As I saw the word crease angle I immediately thought
> about the same notion in VRML. Interpolation between normals is only done if
> the angle is smaller than this value, so if it is too small, the drastic change
> in direction of the normals at the edges and the vertices is too big, giving all
> those nasty shadows. To check if it was really that, I put the crease angle back
> to zero, but to no avail, I have to recreate the cube.

No, you don't have to ;-)

Apparently, Wings3D does not refer to the angle between the faces, but 
the angle between their ("raw") normal vectors. So to undo your changes 
(aside from actually using Undo :-P) you'd have to specify a crease 
angle of, say, 100.

Or you can simply mark all edges (e.g. select the cube in object mode, 
then switch to edge mode), then pick "Hardness"/"Soft".

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clipka <ano### [at] anonymousorg> wrote:
> nimda schrieb:
> > That worked perfectly. As I saw the word crease angle I immediately thought
> > about the same notion in VRML. Interpolation between normals is only done if
> > the angle is smaller than this value, so if it is too small, the drastic change
> > in direction of the normals at the edges and the vertices is too big, giving all
> > those nasty shadows. To check if it was really that, I put the crease angle back
> > to zero, but to no avail, I have to recreate the cube.
>
> No, you don't have to ;-)
>
> Apparently, Wings3D does not refer to the angle between the faces, but
> the angle between their ("raw") normal vectors. So to undo your changes
> (aside from actually using Undo :-P) you'd have to specify a crease
> angle of, say, 100.
>



> Or you can simply mark all edges (e.g. select the cube in object mode,
> then switch to edge mode), then pick "Hardness"/"Soft".

Meanwhile I found a very good tutorial, and it talks indeed about hard edges and
soft edges, and a lot more interesting stuff (at
http://kent.dl.sourceforge.net/project/wings/manual/1.6.1/wings3d_manual1.6.1.pdf)

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