McLaren wheel chunkiness...
 

Here's a quick shot of my wheel WIP. I am noticing some chunckiness in the center portion - the nut and axle. I have followed the tutorial rather religiously, so not sure what to do here.

Am I the only one with this problem? What to do... increase smoothing angle? (currently 50-60 deg) or add more geometry? I don't think increasing the sub-patch level is necessary (currently 9)

ideas?

http://www.cghaus.com/misc/wheel.jpg

I'd actually check to ensure that you've actually got that part of the mesh subpatched rather than just being plain old polys (which is what it looks like).

Another alternative is to check the mesh for 2 point polys - if there are any in there, remove them since these will also royally screw up a subdivided mesh.

I am absolutely certain the center portion is in subpatch mode. hoewver, i did not check for 2 pt polys... so good advice there. i will check it out tonight.

thanks

Okay... now I am really befuddled. I just scanned the center parts for errant points and 2pt polys. I found nothing wrong. I also confirmed that the center is indeed subpatched.

I tried boosting the smoothing angle and the subpatch level (to 12) with no success.

So... with no 2pt polys and no rogue points... where to go from here?

The screen grab shows my basic settings. Interestingly enough, the object appears very smooth in modeler. Only when it is rendered do the artifacts show up.

this is extremely odd now. so odd, in fact, that i am calling this a bug.

tonight, just for kicks, i boosted the "display subpatch level" to 9 - the same level as my render subpatch level. i figured this would not do anything in the render... because it deals with display only in the viewport. well... it did. the chunkiness went away and now i have smooth surfaces all around. go figure! this has got to be some sort of undocumented feature... one worthy of noting.

the latest picture shows the wheel with display subpatch level bumped to 9.

weird...


**update**

yes... i just confirmed it. display subpatch level set to 1 yields rendered garbage. lol perhaps i am doing something wrong, no? i am using Fprime for my quick renders. Lightwave's native renderer is using my subpatch render level of 9.... where as Fprime is rendering the test display level of 1.

Sounds like it could be an FPrime bug then... I'd email Steve and let him know - its certainly not one that I've seen crop up in the Worley newsgroups, but rumour has it that he's working on version 1.15, so if it's early enough to get a bug fix in.... :D