Extract Render Mesh with properties to keep curvatures

[Frezamolde]

I am trying to extract a render mesh from an object that is a surface. In that surface I put several curves which I added to surface objects properties as a shutlining and configured it as fillet/radius.

then I set the Mesh generation parameters to make it the more realistic i could to make the mesh comparable to a surface fillet.

I suppose it was ok because when i look to the viewport it looks like it is a smooth fillet…

if you extractrendermesh then you got a mesh object in your rhinoceros geometry … Shade the viewport and you have it like this…

so… the mesh looks well… why does it gets like it was a “flat shaded” or a “small detail mesh”? You see that it looks smooth but it’s geometry is exactly as a “chamfer”…

where is my “smooth fillet”? Does it get any better? I am pretty sure it calculated a good mesh to show it to the user… why do I get a “1989 flat mesh?”

[nathanletwory (Nathan 'jesterKing' Letwory)]

I believe you’ll have to take the vertex/face normals into account. That is how much of the effect is handled. Same for edge softening, that adds some geometry, but normals do much of the heavy lifting.

The groove pretty much always gets the same vertex geometry, just the normals are varying. For instance the normals for the middle profile look in the bottom of the groove like this (orange lines)

On the top of the ridge they look like this

By varying these normals you get different visual interpolation. With this middle profile these normals give a rounded top, and a creased bottom.

So, keep in mind that shutlining is first and foremost a visual trick, just like edge softening. The latter is also just a chamfer with normals to do the heavy lifting.