? Making the model look more smooth in real time (target -> android)

Troubleshooting graphics
1

I just learned how to smooth render my model with Blender.
Is there anything I can do to make it look smooth in JME as well, rendering in real time?
The end purpose is to run on an android phone, so capacity is limited.
Tricks that make it look nice while not “truly” changing the model are fine, the looks are what matters.

2

If you use light in material, use shared normals, so that the light caculations dont have hard edges, but interpolate.
of course this requires a changed normal buffer.

3

Thanks for the reply. If anyone could elaborate further I would be grateful.

I have done some searching on the things you mention but I am no wiser.

4

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normal_mapping ^^

5

If you switch the model to smooth in blender and then export it like that you should get what you are looking for if you render it using the lighting material in jme3.

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6
@zarch said: If you switch the model to smooth in blender and then export it like that you should get what you are looking for if you render it using the lighting material in jme3.

Thanks, that works fine on JME. Haven’t been able to test on android yet.

Never thought it could be that easy.

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7

We like to make things easy :slight_smile:

Incidentally smooth shading actually uses fewer vertices than flat shading so is more efficient too.

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8

Wikipedia says smooth shading is more expensive though. Just quoting, I don’t understand it well enough to argue.

9

That’s true, but not in this case.

Because we are using a lighting material the colour for each pixel needs calculating anyway with the lighting information etc. Smooth shading just adjusts the values being used to calculate the lighting.

For flat shading you need to split the vertices into X separate vertices (1 for each adjacent face) as each one has a different normal. That means more vertices to process, transform, etc.

On the other hand for smooth shading all the vertices have the same normal so they can be combined into one.

For using the unlit material things may change a bit but again I don’t see it being an issue on any modern graphics card since its interpolating the values anyway,
Someone with more knowledge of the jme shaders than me may want to weigh in on this though :smiley: