I have a bit of a simple problem that I just need an answer on.
When I’m in Maya I’m able to use the command: Harden/Soften Edge normal to create crisp lines along face edges.
As you can see in this image, in Maya the surface normals are crisp along particular parts of the mesh. Some parts are smoothed but the different smoothed groups meet at specific sharp edges.
When I import the model into Unity it “blobs” the mesh and won’t allow it to have any hard edges at all. However even after tweaking the Mesh Smoothing angle I still can’t get it to look like my Maya version.
Is there any way to have Unity use the exact smoothing data Maya uses? Or will I have to try and fake those sharp edges via texture?
You could separate/unweld the mesh in to parts along the edge you want to keep sharp. That’s basically what the smoothing angle on import does anyway (adds vertexes)
You have tried to recalculate the smoothing normals on the import options?
Check which file format you’re using, it says Normals are supported.
Alright, so far I’ve used .obj and .ma formats with no difference but I’ll try your suggestions and see how it goes. Separating the mesh occured to me but it seems like that would cause to many draw calls?
I don’t know much about your problem, but I’ve read quite some times that exporting in .obj isn’t good at all, you should try exporting as .fbx (that’s what I always used).
And if I recall correctly, you can set the .fbx exporter to keep the smoothing groups.
You must disable smoothing normals altogether. It’s a check box in the model’s import settings. When you disable that Unity will use the normals supplied by Maya.
