Hammerhead and edge flow in general

[johnnymoha]

Poly-modeling: I don't know if its for video or game type purposes, but I would create a cylider with around 8-12 faces and bevel the edges that face outward to the actual hammer head if it was for high poly or leave it plain cylindrical or bevel once for game purposes. Then I would soften all the normals around the edges of the cylinder and the beveled edges by going to-edit polygons(maya 7) or Normals(maya 8.5)-normals-normal angle or soften normal and play with the value til the edges POP and appear to be smoothed. Hope that helps you out

[AlexiT]

What i'm trying to do is create a bunch of more or less simple objects and make a photorealistic rendering. Pretty much just for fun and practice.

My approach to the hammer has been to make a low poly base with nice beveled edges and then subdivide it. The problem obviously being not to draw the edge loops through the whole model, something that often gets me into trouble. Making tri's and n-gons rarely works very well.

If I understand you correctly you mean something like this:
http://i15.tinypic.com/53zywr7.jpg

Here the normals are softened on the tip of the head. However the result unfortunatley not being that good:
http://tinypic.com/view.php?pic=52yh2ki

[johnnymoha]

I see. Okay, looks like my method definitely morks better for game purposes than photorealism like you want. I think as far as the modeling looks it could be smoothed into looking better since your poly count doesnt have much of a limit. Maybe if you had more faces around the cylindrical sides of the head?

[oliveUK]

http://i13.tinypic.com/52yh2ki.jpg


ah ah. This is interesting.... actually this reminds me of a problem I came across in Maya some time ago when I imported a Max model.

The result you are getting is that part of the geometry get smoothed but not the rest because they belong to a different smoothing group.

In Max you would just select all the faces and associate them to the same smoothing group.

I went through the maya manual and there is something similar but it didn't fix it.

I asked few Maya friends and they didn't know what to do either.

There is certainly a way but I have no clue how.

Can you also post the wireframe?

Olive

[MrJames]

Maya doesn't use smoothing groups, instead the srface shading is based on the objects normals. To make the object look faceted got to Normals>Harden and to make it look smoother Normals>Soften. You can also get a blend between the two by changing the values. If you only want certain faces to be smoothed/hardened just select the required faces and perform the operation.

[johnnymoha]

I usually select the edges in between the faces to smooth, but some times different things can be achieved by both manners.

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