Reply To: Shade Smooth weird looking?
I still don’t understand completely why the Smooth Shade makes the object look so strange within the viewport. I thought perhaps it was just a viewport thing, but it renders like that, too. So, that’s a bit disconcerting actually.
It looks strange because it’s averaging between faces that are at pretty extreme angles from each other.
For example, imagine what the flat shading would look like on the bottom of the cylinder. Then, imagine a gradient between the middle of the bottom face and the middle of a face on the front. That’s what smooth shading is doing!
It looks strange because adjacent faces are very large (big gradient) and are at extreme angles (lots of contrast).
Because it blends with the adjacent faces, you can also sharpen up the result by adding more edge loops and thus decreasing the size of the extreme gradients. 