Relieving Stress in Hard Surface Modeling

[Austin Dunham]

I need to re-watch some tutorials on hard surface modeling.  One of the trickier thing’s I’m running into is sharpish edges along curved surfaces.  I’ve circled some problem spots in my model and wonder about the best approach to evening things out.

One note, where the horizontal ovals are, the large flat surfaces are “shade flat” and the curves are shade smooth.

[spikeyxxx]

Normally Auto Smooth is able to handle those kind of situations quite well (Properties > Normals > Auto Smooth):

[Austin Dunham]

Thanks @spikeyxxx.  I think the difference between your example and mine is yours is all quads.  If I have auto smooth on the flat surfaces on the back, I get crazy wavy looking plastic.

I did do some cleaning up of vertices that helped.

[Austin Dunham]

@spikeyxxx – I found what you were talking about.

I thought you were talking smooth shading on object.

You were talking about auto smooth under Object Data Properties->Normals->Auto Smooth. . . which you said, but I wasn’t finding.

I feel silly, and that did really help.

Thank you!

[Austin Dunham]

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