Mesh geometry impact on Normals behavior
Posted: Sun Oct 17, 2021 7:35 pm
As many know, I'm a bit of a perfectionist on my building. I've been working to improve many of my existing products on my marketplace store. Currently working on the Torch Tower high rise building, seeking to reduce its complexity while improving its appearance. Improving appearance obviously tends to depend on adding more geometry, either to add more detail or to create greater smoothness in the curve of non-planar faces, however this is not always the case. The images I am sharing shows the glass envelope of the Torch Tower in two geometric patterns that provide starkly different performance on smooth normals.
The four glass envelopes below are actually TWO meshes. On the left is the original mesh, slightly improved over the original. On the far left is one where the faces are all set to be shaded flat, so we see the faceting of the geometry which appears in long vertical rectangles even though the quads are formed more or less square in the mesh. The near-left, I've shaded that geometry smooth, but the normals are clearly not perfectly smooth curves as one would expect. The radius of all loops in this mesh are properly graduated so ideally this should provide a perfectly curving smooth shading, but that is not what we see.
On the right is a significantly simpler mesh, with half of number of horizontal loops of that on the left, but most importantly, the loops are staggered so that the vertical loops become spiraled when triangulated. You can see how the shaded flat normals exhibit this different geometry with this really exquisite diamond pattern that looks like its a piece of fine leaded crystal tableware. But what is really surprising is when shaded smooth, the normals reflect light much more smoothly than the MORE COMPLEX square gridded geometry to the left.
The four glass envelopes below are actually TWO meshes. On the left is the original mesh, slightly improved over the original. On the far left is one where the faces are all set to be shaded flat, so we see the faceting of the geometry which appears in long vertical rectangles even though the quads are formed more or less square in the mesh. The near-left, I've shaded that geometry smooth, but the normals are clearly not perfectly smooth curves as one would expect. The radius of all loops in this mesh are properly graduated so ideally this should provide a perfectly curving smooth shading, but that is not what we see.
On the right is a significantly simpler mesh, with half of number of horizontal loops of that on the left, but most importantly, the loops are staggered so that the vertical loops become spiraled when triangulated. You can see how the shaded flat normals exhibit this different geometry with this really exquisite diamond pattern that looks like its a piece of fine leaded crystal tableware. But what is really surprising is when shaded smooth, the normals reflect light much more smoothly than the MORE COMPLEX square gridded geometry to the left.