In this video I discuss an important and potentially confusing change to auto smoothing in Blender 4.1. You can see the release notes for further details below. developer.blender.org/docs/re... #blender4.1 #blender4 #normals #autosmooth
One small correction on 6:14 - Shade smooth now also supports marking sharp edges so it's a bit different from the 4.0 implementation. I actually really like the change. I previuously always set my auto smoothing angle to be 180 in order to be able to use weighted normals and manually placed sharp edges
I couldn't test it yet but what happens to the custom normals/custom normal data from other softwares/files now? Is that also gone? What about combining multiple meshes that all have custom normal data? Does it break now?
Having to apply a geometry node modifier to each object also means loosing EVERY instance in the scene. The whole idea of instancing mesh to get performance becomes obsolete. You can test that with a tree model, duplicate it 20 times, check performance, then add the modifier to all. Incredible that the Blender community let that happen.
I would highly suggest that you send this comment to the developers. Go to the HELP menu and submit a bug report. Otherwise you're just being upset at the messenger.
@@robertYoutub Blender devs are quite notorious to ignore user's suggestions. The transfer shape key option is broken since the beginning of Blender and they just refuse to do anything, for example
@@happyotter9 I know. Like the curve deformer doing a 90° turn on Y and Z axis. Bug report date back 8 years. I think that the concept on how Blender gets develop. They make nice decision and than try to realise as much as possible. Its developer driven company like Luxology was. The problem lies in frustrating work that can get very complicated and take years. For example, the new animation system being the preparation on USD support because of many problems with the parenting system, or the still missing new particle system, that didn't really made it yet do to general problems with geometry nodes. etc. In the end, it's not much better in other companies, just having different priorities. I waited 7 years for a performance fix in Modo, all caused by new frame work. Nuts.
The only real regression in the workflow is that you can no longer have automatically updating auto smooth on data-level. But that's not a problem exclusive to smooth by angle. A proper solution to this would be adding a separate modifier stack for data-level.
I don't mind this system but the right click option wont work how anyone expects it to. The logic might make sense but that doesn't matter if the users don't understand it. An option to automatically mark edges as sharp based on angle should be left for edit mode. It's where you'd expect to find destructive options like this, and you'd get visual feedback as to what's actually happening.
I think, like i've seen many discussions over the decade, the response is severely over exaggerated. The group that's affected is very small, and it's downside is a mild inconvenience, that you'll probably only mistake once or twice. Besides that, it's based on what you think people would have an problem with, not based on actual data of how many people actually run into this problem. Btw object mode also has mostly destructive actions. Moving an object around is a destructive method. The only way to get an object directly back to it's old location is Ctrl-Z
@@DrTheRich the difference is that this is an action thats destructive towards data that the user would otherwise assume is going to remain unaltered. It can stay in this menu if necessary, but it needs to be clearer that it's not the same function as before. Blender renames buttons all the time, so the assumption is that the functionality will be the same
@@existentialselkath1264 This is true, it's not an invalid point. but then for the same reason "shade smooth" and "shade flat" should not be in object mode. The button there has only existed for half a year now. I'm a 15 year+ blender user, and never even pressed it in the short time it existed, because i have different ways of getting the same done. They gave it a new name, and an appropriate tooltip that explains what it does. Blender has never been in the habit of putting "THIS FUNCHTION CHANGED" behind a button name or something. That would also look really ugly. It's only a small inconvenience, for a small amount of people, that you will quickly get used to, and in a year you will forget you even had a problem with it. I've been around, and I've seen this happen many times, with way more controversial chances (like right-click select)
@@DrTheRich shade smooth and shade flat are hardly destructive. They don't change what edges are set to sharp and if you're manually setting parts of the mesh to flat and smooth in edit mode (which it would destroy) you probably shouldn't be anyway. I understand what you mean though. I don't have a huge issue with it, I mean I know what it does now so that's fine. I do think it's a bit of a ux oversight though.
@@existentialselkath1264 I think you're confusing the categorical term "destructive" with the common word "destructive" the shadings options are by definition destructive, because they permanently change replace a property that you can only get back by either ctrl-z or doing another action, that also replaces it. Non-destructive options "overlay" a property, and can be hidden or shown, or canceled, like a modifier. If you save a file, with a flat shaded sphere, you smooth shade it, save it, and send it to someone else, they cannot know that it was previously flat shaded, that old setting is overridden aka destroyed. And yes the shade flat and shade smooth options do change the mesh data properties one by one, but not the edges, but the faces. It's not an object level property, sharp or flat shading has always been an edit mode level property, that just happened to have a quick convenient shortcut in object mode. "I do think it's a bit of a ux oversight though." it was not an oversight, this was a deliberate choice with pros and cons that you simply don't agree with. They added that option, so that people who were searching for at least something with a similar result to the previous "Shade auto-smooth" had something to find in the place where they previously would search for it.
I presume this was done for improved usd compliance. It actually makes a lot of sense to put autosmooth alongside the other non destructive operations. Though putting a deceptively similar function in the object context menu makes less sense, if it were up to me I would have just put shade smooth by angle in the edge or mesh menu.
I'm coming in with the unpopular opinion but imo this is neat. When you're animating deforming meshes (like characters), you don't ever want to use auto smooth because it messes up renders when you use motion blur in Cycles (because it's re-calculating normals each frame). But it gets turned on when you recalculate vectors or accidentally use shade autosmooth when using the space bar to search for shade smooth without realizing it. Then you get buggy looking motion blur on renders without realizing it until you've rendered 1000+ frames of an animation because some frames don't get affected by it (or the effect is hard to notice without looking closely). So you need to pick out the bad frames and re-render those and it's just a big pain in the butt. Though I think there should have always been some kind of check box in preferences. Like "Neve use autosmooth" so it never gets turned on if your workflow almost never requires it's use.
Yeah that's pretty much why I don't mind the change. But geometry nodes always in my experience have poor performance, so I hope this won't slow things down.
I never did character animation but i did have motion blur issues with geonodes. So for char anim you want the sharp edge method? Using that with just shade smooth doesnt cause issues? Im wondering if that was also causing issues for me since i was also altering geometry with geonodes that was autosmoothed…
I do think the logic behind this effort makes sense but the implementation is bad or what is bad is how much extra work this can add considering how limited blender is with manipulating modifiers among many objects
@@cekuhnen if you have the copy attributes add-on, copying modifiers over to many objects is fairly simple (control+c to bring the menu up). If you hold alt while changing a value the changes should propagate to the selected object's modifiers. Bit more work but you'd have to do the alt trick to change the auto smooth angle on multiple objects/turn on/off anyway.
@@cekuhnen also here's a bit of python that might be helpful if you have more specific needs for changing modifiers across many objects, this is a simple example (just copy/paste in the text editor and run it that way): import bpy # select the objects you want for o in bpy.context.selected_objects: for m in o.modifiers: # change the type to the desired modifier: if m.type == 'SUBSURF': # put whatever variable supported by the desired modifier here m.levels = 1
Very good in-depth explanation of the change in the Auto Smooth feature. Just one mistake I noticed: when you switch to 4.1 and use Shade Smooth on the sphere at first you say, ""it just takes and smoothes all the angles regardless, if you have manual sharp edges, it ignores those." That's not correct. The Shade Smooth feature was changed in 4.1 as well, and as you can see in your video it has the option "Keep Sharp Edges" enabled by default. So by default it does not ignore manual sharp edges - you have to turn it off. It's just that you had not yet defined manual sharp edges when you were using Shade Smooth in that moment, otherwise the sharp edge would have shown.
ngl, the new change is a good fool proof for new Blender users because they don't know what the software is doing with the Auto Smooth default since it now say where the sharp edge is, but for long time users this change is like "Brrrrrrrrrrrrrrr" level of frustration.
I love Blender and have been with it for many years, but if such a simple function needs such a long explanation then there is something to be improved when it comes to UX. Seriously, it can't stay like this. It should be one click and done.
The feature can be explained in seconds, you shade smooth the object looks smooth you select edges and mark them as sharp now those edges are sharp, that's it. And not everything needs to be 1 click, you right click and you select shade smooth, 2 clicks, simple. If every feature was 1 click then the UI would be cluttered with hundreds of buttons. Nothing wrong with 2 clicks/menus, it's just organization. The video is only this long because it's an in-depth understanding of what smooth shading even is, mostly for people that never used this stuff before.
Anybody can these days makea tutorial abt anything they think they know But Original teachers are only few and you being one of them. congras and thank you. All surface level users are crying over the autosmooth change but only in depth users know and appreciate it like me, lol !. B/w All change is good and welcomed except that in 4.1, the right clik menu option"Auto smooth", name is misinforming, rather it shud have been renamed to something like Auto Sharp Smooth
Thank you so much for taking the time to explain this extremely clearly, instead of whining, complaining and cursing like some others Blender RU-vidrs did. Now I not only understand the introduced change in 4.1, and why it will probably be better in the long run, but I also understand better the previous behaviour; I never thought of looking at the normals at the vertices level; it makes so much sense!
Kind of crazy they aren't taking criticism on it with the massive UX regression. 10x slower to add the modifier with the new slower to use modifier menu. Seems fine until you need to remove 100 shade smooth modifiers from 100 objects manually one at a time. Or you now need to enable an addon to add 100 shade smooth modifiers to 100 objects. Or a beginner user does a tutorial and right clicks autosmooths and gets a totally different behavior to the tutorial they're following.. Kind of amazing how little thought they put to UX when thats beens such a main focus the last couple of years. Otherwise, I can udnerstand why it needed to be implemented
To be clear, Shade Smooth is pretty much the same as before. It doesn't require a modifier be added. If Shade Smooth was enabled in 3.6 or 4.0, it is the same in 4.1. It's only if Shade AutoSmooth was enabled that a new modifier is added to the modifier stack. That's done automatically when you open a file, you don't have to do it for hundreds of objects manually if they were tagged with Shade Auto Smooth in earlier versions. But yes, IF you use shading with angle based shading breaks, then you'll need to assign it to an object as a modifier.
@@christopher3d475Yeah we understand that its transferring over smoothing from older files. Its not even close to being the same as before. There are so many problems with it and it's kind of crazy they're going ahead with it
I always think your content is AAA, pertinent. For beginners, though, the distinctions between splitting the geometry with Split Edges , biasing the behaviour of CC Subdiv. with Crease (geometry again), and affecting only the interpolation of Normals across edges with Smooth.. it's not always that obvious? I'm not sure about putting Creasing and Smoothing into the same episode without making that super-clear. But you're a whole lot better at this stuff than me, and that's my only niggle.
I’m really new to blender so I might ask/say something odd for some more advanced users, but isn’t it more aligned with some other parts of blender that changed from 3.9x to 4.0? I swear I saw other modifiers or geometry nodes doing that already, because few days ago I actually searched about that happening. If my assumption is correct, that makes sense to do it, even if some users will be lost at first. Regardless, nice video, I actually learned quite a few things!
I finally know what "Auto" meant in auto-smooth to begin with 😅 Knowing now it is was a non-destructive operation, could of avoided so many problems. This change makes a lot more sense now, thanks.
Blender s Developers should change theyr priorities (it seams they are adding stuff just because they can) There are major issues that they should fix before going on adding this "useless" changes. You wanna change my mind? find me an OFFICIAL release of a "Curve to mesh" geometry node that has an "even thikness" option.
These were necessary changes at a fundamental level to allow for future developmental efforts. In fact they were necessary for geometry node development. The priorities were correct, just because you don't understand why the changes were made doesn't mean they were bad decisions.
@@christopher3d475 "You ain't need to be a chief to rate the dish" If ppl don't like it, maybe something is wrong? (Also this miserable grow in speed have no impact on bugs with 5 y.o. state and total ignore from dev)
TBH I always found the auto smooth option to be kinda hard to discover the way it was put in the interface in the past. This change makes a ton of sense.
Thanks for sharing this geat videos and tutorals! I have always thought that learning the theory and how software works insead of only memorizing a task is the best way to become a better artist.
I have a question you may be able to answer. Auto smooth breaks motion blur rendering on animated assets (look up ‘Big Motion Blur Issues In Cycles’ on YT if you want examples). You get really bad artifacts in the motion blur making it impossible to use. With 4.1 are you able to get the same visual results with Shade Smooth by Angle and replace/delete the Auto Smooth modifier for assets causing that specific issue? This is particularly a problem on lower poly assets using baked normal maps where you don’t have the ability to just edit the model, turn off auto smooth and add edge loops.
It's a good question and I don't know the answer to that. However, other people have spoken about it. You can report it to the developers through the Help menu item. They've been responsive to issues I've reported that way.
For the people who hate this feature on first glance, it's understandable, but let me try to explain why this was the right (and only logical) way to go. The auto-smoooth should have been a modifier from the get-go. That it wasn't, was a leftover from old old old blender. And it made things really confusing once you started going into custom normals etc. To be fair, most users didn't even know auto-smooth existed before they put it in the right click menu recently. And it makes sense, everything in the editing right click menu in edit mode IS destructive, so having a non-destructive function auto-smooth there is weird. All non-destructive features should be modifiers and/or geo-nodes To me the change becomes even more understandable, if you actually realize how the whole thing worked data wise. If you wonder why sharp edge markings weren't available before in Geonodes, this is why. Because traditionally a mesh could have three states in terms of normal: - automatically caclulated normals (flat or smooth) - custom normals automatically generated (auto-smoot checkbox) - manual custom split normals (Geometry Data tab) These three things were 3 different features that all edited normals, and were a real mess behind the scenes. This also lead to confusing behaviour for users. For example, if you had custom split normal data in your mesh, the normal smooth/flat functions wouldn't work anymore and you wouldn't realize it. It also led to problems with bevel modifier shading. weird conflict if you want to harden the normals based on weight, but you have them marked sharp based on angle or manually, and it would lead to shading glitches. For the first time ever, bevel hardened normals works correctly, and the warning "auto-smooth not enabled" is gone. And lastly this mess of a 3 systems prevented custom edge marking and normal edit stuff in geometry nodes, which was a huge miss for me. Most of these things you start noticing once you get deeper into blender and doing more advanced stuff. I understand this is a thing to get used to, but just like many controversial changes to blender in the past decade, I think they were for the better in the long run. This could not have been fixed any better way. And if there isn't already, I'm sure they will make a node for this soon.
I think the problem is that now you need to keep dragging the modifier down the bottom of the stack whenever you add a new modifier and reapply it each time you collapse all the modifiers. Before this was just done automatically.
@@andywilson5677 That's one way to look at it, the other is: before you had no control over when the auto-smooth was applied. So you just gained a feature. But looking at it principally, it should always have been a modifier. If you add it last after you added your other modifiers, no dragging necessary. Besides, I rarely use hard edges anymore, the more professional my work became, I always use bevels, no matter how small the edge, it just looks infinitely better, even for stylistic low poly. I also always have to drag that around to the bottom (if i don't add it last), and with the old systems i had to enable auto-smooth after adding the bevel, to get hardened normals to work correctly. that is now fixed. So in my workflow this saves a click, in yours it might add a drag. It's not a problem, it's just an inconvenience (for some) that solves a problem.
Very nice video! Thank you! The change is not so nice for a poly modeler, though. As it adds additional clicks and moving the modifier in the stack. And doing so for hundreds of objects is not so fun.
Not everything will need the modifier, many SubD object don't need it once Shade Smooth is enabled. But yes, this is new and might take some getting used to.
they added a thousand steps now for you to have auto-smooth when... you already had it with a single click... now you need to create a modifier, position the modifier taking consideration other modifiers you might have... you gonna spend like 3 min now figuring out in which level you should let your smooth modifier on the modifier stack... turning something that was so simple into something hard and frustrating. and this thing deciding for you on marking edges as sharp? like... wtf? now you gonna have to waste some time un-sharpening things... congrats for the genius who come with the ideia.
No wonder NVidia quit as Blender supporter. Using Blender for 14 years and feel the program turning into a joke (similar as Zbrush now). Lots of core things that need fixes, yet they keep adding fluff or overcomplicating things
Exactly the last great advice in blender was geometry nodes, after that they just adding nonsense functionalities and flooding the software with overcomplicated steps just so the software can feel "pro" like "oh now you need a PhD to apply auto-smooth, our softwares is so pro now because you need to do 1000 steps to do a simple thing, this feels soooo PRO" guess what, it feels like shit, you guys already lose to maya on the broad industry the greater users are free lancers and self-taught artists, if you keep with this stupid ideia of turning every single functionality into a modifier i give you guys 5 years max of life on the market, imagine the next bright ideia "oh imagine us turn... edit mode and edit vertex into a modifier, oh better one... all the edit mode functions into a standalone modifier for each of the functions" i don't doubt it.
@@aiizawa2655 In fact these changes were needed to continue proper development of geometry nodes. Certain things couldn't be implemented unless fixes were made to how Blender handles surface normal smoothing. These changes aren't random haphazard changes.
@@christopher3d475 Yeah geometry nodes, used by 1% of blender users who are already coders anyways and they just like to code with nodes instead of writing scripts. Splendid. While destroying workflow of the other 99% of users. Besides they shouldn't have made both mutually exclusive. They should have kept the old autosmooth while adding the new geonode modifier.
@@canyongoat2096 Complaining to me isn't going to accomplish any changes, I'm just a messenger. You need to send concrete examples of how it's messed up your workflow to the bug system. That's the only way things are going to change if enough users take that specific action.
This chage is really weird, i think it ok the auto smooth from 4.0 but if someone tell me what really is improve because like old blender user only move the auto smooth to the modifiers tho
It's long been my understanding that shade autosmooth isn't necessary, and is, in fact undesirable on sub-d modified objects. I think it's useful to understand the importance of the position of the new smooth by angle modifier in the stack, but I don't think sub-d is the best use-case example.
No, surface normal smoothing is needed for subdivided meshes. It's actually a good demonstration because if you put the AutoSmooth modifier in the wrong place it's change the smoothing in a bad way, just like the example I give.
@@christopher3d475 Surface normal smoothing, yes. But not autosmoothing by angle. The wrong place for the modifier is anywhere in the stack - if using a sub-d modifier (imo.)
@@joey848 If you have full creasing on some part of your SubD model, then you have two choices to break the normals; 1) via manually setting same edges to sharp edges (split normals); or, 2) via autosmoothing via angle. If you're going to deform the mesh in some way that changes the angles, perhaps autosmoothing via angle isn't the best option, otherwise why not just let the autosmoothing modifier do the work for you? Had I not shown the modifier with a subD mesh, guaranteed people would have added it at some point without realizing it needs to be below, so it was a 'best use-case' example for that reason.
Somehow in my 5 years of blendering, I'd never come across an example of the sub-d with creasing workflow. Thanks to Arrimus 3d's channel, I'm now finally aware. This is good info for that use-case, and I humbly take back my critique. In the sub-d sans creasing workflow I learned, regular smooth shading does the trick, and autosmooth is unnecessary.
blender V4.1 just keep crashing ..if i run same file in older version like blender V4.0. its just work smoothly..but if you work in older version its say.. you will loss some data if you save file in older version..do we have solution
Let me try to convince you: Without this change sharp edges would never be possible in geo-nodes. This change was necessary to implement a vital missing part of the geo-nodes feature set, as sharp edges now have been fully transferred to work with the attribute system.
@@christopher3d475 I'm not, just a long time professional user (even worked with a studio on a feature film made with blender). But I do know a lot of people on the dev team personally, as I live close to the main office, have visited often, and talked a lot about blenders development with them.
this is so dumb. Why didn't they just make it shade autosmooth with 180 degrees by default so we would be able to make sharp edges without activating some chackbox initially. That old aproach of setting an angle was a dumb idea from the start. It should've been 180 degrees and if we would feel like control it, that's when the modifier would come along, but now we have this overcomplicated bs.
None of this works for me, I can no longer get the 100% smouth that we could have in a single click like in the previous version. Does anyone know how to do this?
@@christopher3d475 No, at least not on the face meshes that I sculpted, I always have dark faces, even with shade smouth by angle set to 180. I'm going back to version 4.0 for my part since I couldn't find anything on RU-vid.
@@jhonysteak5512 If you suspect a bug of some sort, the best thing to do is submit a bug report through the Help menu. I've gotten a handful of issues resolved by doing that.
Is it legal to use this? I mean why not to make a proper topology for subdiv? I just can not understand it in general. There are so many modeling technics to achive this result. Why not use a simple checkbox? Or make some parameter equal to 1 and you are done. Without all this supporting loops and things like this.
No amount of 'proper topology' will get around needing to using surface normal smoothing to get polygons to have curved, smoothed shading. Every 3D application uses the same core functionality, but with different approaches. The Blender developers needed to make these changes to clean up old inefficient code which would also allow for new functionality in geometry nodes. So these changes weren't just something haphazard.
God, they really need to re-structure the whole idea of what modifiers are!!! Why did they move this to the modifiers when it is a Geometry Node setup anyway? I know, Blender has a long past and it's free and great and I have no idea how hard it would be to restructure any of this... BUT these things really make it hard to get to know your way around. Sorry and a fair warning: this turned out to be a bit of a rant. First of all: Modifier drop down menu categories make very little sense. At least before, as simple buttons, they where accessible with just one click. I know, new auto-smooth modifier uses geo nodes but from a topical perspective it should be where 'weighted normals' and 'normal editing' modifiers can be found. Or move those to 'Normals' instead. Or if you come from a technical perspective give up the 'modifier' tab completly, put Normals editing where Normals have their own Sub-Menu, shading under Material Properties. By this time, 'Modifier' is just a meaningless term for so many different things that do all kinds of different things on all kind of different levels. Finally give 'Geometry Nodes' it's own Properties slide, putting everything, that uses Geo Nodes, under it - just like Physics, Particles and Constraints. While I'm at it: Why are the physics properties still also in the modifier tab??? They are listed twice but can only be edited from the Physics Tab. No one adds them in the modifier tab anyway, right? Same goes for Particles. Or 'Bone Constraints': they are super important for any complex Armature but for some reason only accessible in Pose Mode? So many people confuse them with Object Constraints. They are clearly a setup feature of an Armature, not a thing you would mix with a posing and animation workspace. At least make them appear in both modes - and make them visually more different from Object Constraints. Make all Armature property tabs a different color than green. Green is used for Vertex Properties. There are so many colors: Purple for instance. Makes it instantly clear that Armature / Bones / Bone Constraints belong together, are not linked to Vertex Properties in any direct way. Or another one: why do some features have their own Editor Type but really important things like Weight-, Texture Painting or Pose Mode go by Viewport dropdown menu when you are able to switch between whole workspace setups ontop? There are basically 3 window menu systems, that all more or less try to do the same thing but none does it consistently. I say get rid of the 3DViewport mode dropdown and just make different Editor Types out of all of them, put each in it's own workspace with other useful windows, depending on the task at hand. When I weight paint, I want to pose at the same time without switching modes and clicking objects over and over again. 3D Viewport: why are the 'Clipping Settings', 'View Lock', etc not in the top icon menus like all other Viewport settings? Why is there still a 'view menu' in the N panel anyway? All settings that manipulate the View Port should be accessible at one place up top - or the other way around. Texture Painting: why is the selection menu for the materials / textures super small and not scalable? If one uses a naming scheme that has more than 10 letters for their texture files, it is impossible to select them - makes that thing a guessing game, ending up switching through all texture slots until you have found it by accident. There is so much more! I feel that Blender is indecisive: should it organize from a technical perspective or make it easy for artists to just jump right in and add a bunch of 'Modifiers'? Right now it's mushing both ways together, making it very inconsistent.
@christopher3d475 luckily I backup fairly regularly so I've just spent about 45 minutes regressing the files back to 4.0.2. I had a play around with the new implementation and I understand how it works, but it's just irritating. I used to be able to make a simple model, say a chest with bands around it. Shade auto smooth and apply a bevel modifier, and it'd be basically done. Now though, if you select shade smooth by angle, it marks sharp, so the bevel modifier won't apply, so you have to go in and get rid of the sharp edges, then faff about. It's a real step back for ease of use. Maybe industry professionals will like it, but I'm not an industry professional, I'm a blender user, I learnt on blender. It's been like this for years, even before auto smooth was on the right click menu, it was still the same functionality but you just had to tick a box once smoothed in the data tab. I hope they can add auto smooth back in in a future update, but I'll be sticking to 4.0 for now. Seriously affected my performance too with multiple autosmoothed objects in the scene (basically everything I make gets autosmoothed), so when I clicked into the modifiers, the new autosmooth modifier had 256 users, so for each object if I need to adjust the modifier per object, I'd need to make a new single user copy I assume. Sounds like a real headache and a lot more system overhead.
The old code had issues that was going to be increasingly problematic with further development of Blender, including and specifically related to geometry nodes.
These changes weren't done to make things more difficult. The old code had issues that was going to be increasingly problematic with further development of Blender, including and specifically related to geometry nodes.
@@christopher3d475 Oh i see. For me they slow down my workflow and therefor feel uncomfortable. I´ll downgrade to 4.0 again and wait how things develop in the future. Thanks for the informative video btw.
@@habukatu7866 No doubt there may be room for optimization. I would highly recommend you submit any models or scenes that have this performance issue to the Help menu bug reporting system. That's the only way things'll get changed.
@@christopher3d475 I'm still watching your video hoping to find an answer lol - i'll edit this comment in case you do answer it in the video. I hope you don't mind me randomly asking (as I found this video trying to grasp my mind around it). I have a hard time finding an explanation as a texture/normal and blender n00b - I have some old characters that look perfectly fine in earlier blender versions (
@@NoSkills1988 Simply enabling Shade Smooth is the base operation you want to do. This calculates the models normals interactively regardless of angle. For instance a cube will have bad apparent shading because the normals are being shaded across regardless of their 90° angles. I would suggest that you make sure there aren't any hard edge assignments on your model. I suppose it's possible Blender 4.1 is somehow assigning hard edges. If you go to the Data Object Properties for the object in question, go to the Attributes panel. If there are any hard edge breaks assigned there will be an entry called 'sharp_edge'. You can remove it. If you want you can alternatively send me a file to look at.
Another update that makes me sick. another dumb solution in the user interface, like the drop-down list of modifier categories from the previous 4.0 update. what are you guys smoking? You removed the more or less normal list of modifiers and replaced it with a drop-down list divided by categories, is this the best thing you could damn come up with? Thank you for having to install another plugin that I could easily do without. Dudes, please find a normal UX UI specialist and don't force people to play a drop-down list simulator.
@@christopher3d475 Don't get me wrong, I love the blender, it's my main tool. But when unjustified solutions roll back the user experience to the Middle Ages, it's frustrating. After all, everything was fine before that. Why break something that works well?
I think we have to take the long view. AutoSmooth *is* a modifier.. it makes calculations on the live mesh, as deformed. It's been converted for consistency in the UI, and it's right that it can be placed appropriately in the stack, for the desired effect. Also bear in mind, looking ahead to Everything Nodes, a generally more procedural (consistently non-destructive) strategy, there will be many more modifiers.. including those generated by the community. The modifier menu will need to be split to be usable, possibly with optional categories. Blender's core UI has always seemed to me to aspire to be minimal, consistent, complete. It's not afraid of a clean-out the way some commercial packages are, and should not be allowed to develop an accretion of crud.
This new implementation is stupid. I like that you can change where the auto smooth is applied in the mod stack but the "shade smooth by angle" in the right click menu is idiotic.
@@DrTheRichbecause it appears to be the same option as users would already be familiar with, and would even have the same result at first glance, but would actually be pretty destructive. Imagine you've manually put in a lot of sharp edges across a mesh, then use this option, and as you continue to edit the mesh you realise the sharp edges aren't adapting. By that point it's too late and you can't just get rid of the sharp edges without removing the manually set edges too. By appearing to be the same as the old option, its just asking for people to use it incorrectly unless they religiously follow videos like these.
@@existentialselkath1264 I mean, i see your point, but Ctrl-Z exists... When you press the button, a bunch of blue edges appear. if you get to a point where you're advanced enough to hide the sharp edge markings, you're also to a point, i think, you should be wise enough to not accidentally make this mistake. Besides that, you call it an "old option" as if people have developed a decade of muscle memory for it that's hard to unlearn. But the right click menu itself isn't a year old even. And the "shade auto smooth" option wasn't even added to that until recently. I'm currently even at a point professionally, where i never even use the sharp edges feature any more, because of my work, i make realistic models, and sharp edges are never realistic. I only bevel, no matter how sharp, using the harden normals checkbox (that had glitches before this 4.1 rewrite of the normal system) Really i think the percentage of blender users fall in the category that have to relearn this feature. are the ones that started learning blender in the past half year. Anyone older wasn't even used to it. and from now on new people won't even know how it was before. And to be fair to the devs, they did gave it a different name.
@@existentialselkath1264 At worst it makes this choice debatable, not ideotic. There is reason behind it. and it has it's pro's and con's, and the people it affects is limited (most older users never even use the right click menu, and newer ones won't know it was different) The button isn't "old" it didn't even exist a year ago.
@@DrTheRich 'old' just meaning the existing option. As opposed to the 'new' one. That's just being pedantic. As for the choice being idiotic, I don't agree with op on this but I'd assume it's an exaggeration anyway. I don't think anyone actively working on blender is an idiot. Obviously they have reasons behind their actions. I'm just explaining why I assumed OP might not like the decision.
