Edge softening shading bug?

I was playing around and found that edge softening gives weird bug in rendered/arctic viewport mode

The left one is filleted right one is with edge softening on.

Here is also progressive study and each one gives different shading while third and second should look the same


3dm file edge_soft_models.3dm (420.1 KB)

@pascal i wasn’t sure who i should tag with this one

Edge softening is a trick really. You essentially get chamfered edges with normals calculated such that they kinda look round. But they are not. With larger softening values you’ll see rendering errors. When you need actually rounded edges you should use Fillet instead.

When you extract the render mesh from a model with a large softening setting you’ll see that the rounded edges aren’t really that rounded. The shading errors happen because the normal interpolation fight with the surfaces (simply put). This is why you need to use fillet when you need big softenings.

I get that @nathanletwory :slight_smile: I use it for rendering purposes a lot maybe there could be option for denser rounding ? :slight_smile: It works way better than in v5 already but maybe it could be even better?

Anyway hats off for display pipeline i didn’t thought it will be ever possible and i still can’t believe what i see :open_mouth:

Fluid and nicely shaded viewport with this lawn.

Arctic:

Rendered:

There would be 71211549 total triangular polygons in this model after forced triangulation !!!

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Even better would essentially be filletting :slight_smile: but I guess it also depends on @DavidEranen how far he can push it.

In terms of shading probably yes but in terms of uv mapping this could be more complicated - now areas which are rounded are getting already made mapping when fillets would be introduced this could destroy very robust usage of this :wink: But it could get sth like levels/steps for rounding - this could be similar to beveling steps for edges like in blender for eg.

@D-W At some point in the future we might replace the current edge softening algorithm with something more sophisticated. For now, edge softening is supposed to be used for very small radii.

Use FilletEdge :wink:

-David

@DavidEranen Yes Sir :wink:

What plugin do you use for that vegetation ?

IIRC Those were VizPark Real Grass models mostly. Scattered with very early Rhino Nature builds.

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Nice !
Does Rhino Nature come with trees, grass, flowers of it’s own or they have to be made and textured separately ?

Yes it has 121 HQ models organized in 36 presets you can roughly check how those look and were created here and here. TBH it took a while to create this whole library from scratch :sweat_smile: More details about RN here.

Impressive ! :astonished:

a) Is there a list for those 121 vegetation models (to get an idea of what types of plants are there).
For example are there olive trees, or other Mediterranean varieties ? … roses, vines ?

b) You said from scratch. Were these modelled and textured in Blender initially ?

It seems that best poor-man’s grass model is decimeter-size, hexagonal patch of grass. Grasshopper can make hexagonal array of the patch and it can randomly rotate the patch. There are 6 angles of rotation: 0°, 60°, 120°, 180°, 240°, and 300°.