A fairly common requirement for low poly modelling is the ability to mix flat and gouraud shaded triangles in the same mesh. Typically you want shared normals with interpolation to make objects appear smoother than they actually are, but at some threshold you need the faces to stop sharing normals to preserve hard edges.
Turns out this is easy to enable in Blender, but it's a 2 step operation.
Turns out this is easy to enable in Blender, but it's a 2 step operation.
- Select the mesh, go into edit mode, under faces, select smooth
- Now in the mesh editor, activate Auto Smooth and pick the angle that works for your model.
In the left image, the model is completely smooth shaded with vertex normals being shared by adjacent faces. This looks great for curved surfaces but is completely wrong for sharp edges. The image on the right is using Auto Smooth. We still get shared normals across most surfaces but can set the angle at which new unique normals are generated. A better looking result for minimal real time performance impact.
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