CODEWITHSUNDEEP
mayamel
Pat Niemeyer
Pat Niemeyer

Reputation: 6418

How can I smooth the seam from merged geometry in Maya?

I'm not sure if this is a geometry problem or a normal problem but I am having a hard time combining meshes without leaving a "seam" or visible discontinuity. In the example below I have a simple example with two sphere polygons with matching divisions. I have done a union and merged nearby vertices. I then tried to do a little manual adjustment to smooth it, but as you can see the result is not good.

I know that I can use the smooth tool to smooth it by adding new geometry, but I feel like given that the vertices match perfectly here I should be able to fix this through some other means. I've played with "soften edge normals" but I don't see any effect from that. I've tried averaging vertices but that doesn't seem to do much. I've gone to the sculpting tools and using the relax and smooth tools there... No matter how correct the geometry looks to me it still appears discontinuous unless I use the add-geometry smoothing tool.

What is the correct way to merge geometry like this?

thanks.

UPDATE:

I'm going to mark the answer below correct even thought it is basically one of the procedures I tried before. I think the real answer is that I just wasn't performing the merge very well (cutting the geometry and merging the edges in the cleanest way possible) prior to softening the edge.

enter image description here enter image description here enter image description here

Upvotes: 1

Views: 1964

Answers (1)

Andy Jazz
Andy Jazz

Reputation: 58553

Here is how to merge geometry and get rid of unpleasant seam from scratch:

a) Delete a history for each object (Edit–>DeleteByType–>History)

b) Combine a mesh (Mesh–>Combine)

c) Merge the edges, controlling a tolerance (EditMesh–>Merge)

d) Soften the edges, controlling an angle (MeshDisplay–>SoftenEdge)

Remember, Angle parameter makes the edge hard/soft.

enter image description here

Here are MEL equivalents:

// Deleting a history
DeleteHistory;

// Combining a mesh
polyUnite;

// Merge border edges within a given threshold
polySewEdge;

// Softening the edge (angle = 0...180)
polySoftEdge;

MEL example for softening the edge:

select -r pSphere2.e[35:54];
polySoftEdge -a 180;

Upvotes: 0

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