Auto Smooth is Back in Blender 4.2?

[Zodiac Glory]

Blender 4.2 released actually when I was midway through this course and I updated to it. When I went to Blender to practice this tutorial I had the “Shade Auto Smooth” option in my context menu and it works exactly, at least as far as I can see and understand, the same as how it works in this tutorial in 4.0.

Thanks for the answers in advance, and also thanks for this course.🙏

[Sascha Feider]

Sorta kinda. The new “Shade auto-smooth” in the context menu simply automatically adds the “smooth by angle” modifier, introduced in 4.1, to your object and you can adjust the angle from there, rather than under “normals” as it used to be pre-4.1. I believe it also automatically pins the modifier to the bottom of the stack, another useful change in 4.2, so you don’t have to worry about its position anymore.

The more destructive way of adding “mark sharp” to certain edges via the smooth option in the context menu has been removed, because it was so unpopular. Yet with the modifier you still have more flexibility with adjusting the angles at which blender shades smooth.

[Adrian Bellworthy]

Yeah as @SFE-Viz says, auto smooth never actually went away, it just changed how it works.
Instead of the old days of hunting down the Auto Smooth settings in the properties panel, we now have a modifier instead.

The only thing I will say is, mark sharp edges still has it’s uses and are not really destructive. Using an angle based approach with auto smooth may get you 90% of what you need sharp, adding a few edges as mark sharp will give you a more accurate result.

Simply, Auto smooth is a good result, but may not be perfect in all cases.

[Zodiac Glory]

So if I understand it correctly it’s an easier-to-use version of the new version of auto smooth that was added in 4.1 which was “Smooth by Angle”, with other QoL changes in parts of Blender that I am yet to learn.

Thanks for your help.

[Adrian Bellworthy]

@Collector6777 Yes, Basically.
You may be interested in CORE due for release very soon (about 2 weeks I believe), The Mesh Modeling fundamentals has a lesson that will explain it better.
Also RELIC is due August, which has an excellent example of how/when to use Auto Smooth and Sharp Edges in tandem.

[Sascha Feider]

Adrian is right, I probably should have put the “destructive” in quotation marks, as it doesn’t really do damage to the mesh.

It was more of an inconvenience the way 4.1 worked with it, when the sharp marking wasn’t necessary or unintended. Mark sharp is definitely a useful tool. Just not automatically applied. 

[Scott McClellan]

Well… thanks for this question/observation. Was just about to comment the same, but was beat to the finish line (if I was from Scandinavia – would it be Finnish line? )

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