Smoothing groups are ways that you can make an object with sharp corners, to have no sharp corners to make them more curved and rounded instead of the object being sharp. To do this it will make an object look detailed to a industry standard.

There are three main types of smoothing groups and they are:

  • Mesh Smooth
  • Open  Subdiv
  • Turbo Smooth

Mesh smooth is an modifier that smooths geometry of an object, by doing this it will subdivide the geometry while interpolating the angles of new faces at corners and edges by the power of 4.

Open Subdiv is a source of open libraries that implement a high performance of subdivision on surfaces. It is mainly used for drawing and deforming surface with static topology interactive frame rates. 

Turbo Smooth is another modifier which will change the appearance of an object, turbo smooth does this by computing normal’s for it’s output which is in a faster way than the standard way of doing it yourself.

To use smoothing groups in 3DS Max we where given a file containing some cubes that we had to then add some smoothing groups to the cubes, to make the cubes more them smooth to get rid of any sharp edges we had to add any of the three main smoothing groups/modifiers to the cubes.

To do this we had to find one of the smoothing groups on the modifier list and attach it to one of the cubes, first we attached the mesh smooth modifier to one of the cubes to try and make a rounded ball shape instead of having a cube that we started off with.

Before we started to change the cubes shape this is what the cube looked like as it was before.

Once we added the modifier to the cube we had to then turn the iterations up to 3 to give it a more rounded look. Iterations are the amount of detail that you want an object to have, the more iterations the more detailed the object is but the more you have may make the shape of your object change it shape completely.

This is what it looked like after we did that.

Open Subdiv is used the same way as the mesh smooth modifier but a bit differently for this we had to add a new modifier called creaseset this will let you to be able to select a curtain vertex or edge that you want to select instead of it selecting the whole thing. Once you have add the creaseset modifier to the cube it will then show a yellow box which you can select the vertices or edges that you want. This is what it looks like when applied.

To select the edges that you want you must select them an then click on create set to create the set of edges that you want to be separate to the rest of the object to be able to select them more easily.

We also again put the iterations to 3.

This is what it looks like it looks the same as the first modifier but it is be change using a another modifier which is a lot more powerful.

Turbo Smooth is another way of smoothing an object for this one we added turbo smooth to the cube and put it’s iterations to 3 again, but before we added any iterations we had to add an edit poly to the underneath of the turbo smooth. This will then give us more freedom to change the appearance of the cube.

When using the edit poly we can change it the shapes of the cube to a different shape the shape which I change the cube to was an oval, to do this I had to select the vertex on the edit poly and select all the vertices and move then to where I wanted them. This is what it looked like.

This another one of the cubes that we have to change was using another open subdiv, this time we had to give the cube rounded edges to do this we had to add an edit poly to the cube and connect two line at either side using the connect tool. We had to do this for each side, this time we had to put the iterations to one. To make the cube have a more curved edge all you have to do is more the line further into the cube, the closer you are the less the curve the more you put the line to the centre the bigger the curve.

This is what it looked like.


The last of the cubes that we had to change was to use the turbo smooth again with an edit poly to make one of the comers curved instead of all of them. To do that we had to add to lines to each of the cubes comers by using the connect tool.

This is what it looked like, To get a slanted edge like that we had to remove some of some of the lines connecting the comer together.

We then had to add put the iterations to 3.

This is what it looks like.