Triangles on surfaces after Auto-Smooth

Question

Hi!

After applying the smooth-by-angle, I get shaded triangular shapes on some of my faces. It goes away if I lower the angle threshold, but then some of the details in the bevels lose their roundness.

I've tried recalculating normals and checking for double vertices so far. I also tried the Shade Flat recommended in the other thread (which works!), but I was wondering if there's a more methodical way to do it.

Thanks!
-Nathan

Answer 1 · 2025-05-05T14:47:05Z

n

replied May 5, 2025 2:47pm

1 love

Answer 2 · 2025-05-05T15:57:45Z

Martin Bergwerf replied May 5, 2025 3:57pm

Hi Nathan nnchu001 ,

You can also try lowering the Edge Loops around the buttons as shown here: https://cgcookie.com/community/20171-very-bad-shading

And similar on the sides, where you get bad Shading.

1 love

Answer 3 · 2025-05-05T17:09:05Z

Omar Domenech replied May 5, 2025 5:09pm

Keep in mind tis model is breaking all the modeling rules, it's not clean geometry and it's tricky to have smooth topology. For those huge Ngons to behave well you have to try and stay on their good side, not have weird angles, all the vertices aligned on their axis and other stuff. So what I'm saying is, there are more methodical ways, it's just that this model is an oversimplification, Press Start is more of a test demo of Blender, an intro to Blender, and it's on the other tutorials where you learn all the ins and out and gotcha's.

1 love

Answer 4 · 2025-05-07T01:29:54Z

n

replied May 7, 2025 1:29am

Thanks both of you.

Re: lower the edge loops, it looks like that worked for some of my features - I think I went a bit conservative with inset depths. It helped a bit on the top face, but I still struggled with the sides.

I used the knife tool to split up the face and it seemed to move the weird shadow around a bit, and then I could pick a smaller face to shade flat and it seemed to help. Maybe a janky approach but it works for now.

Thanks for the information about the methodical ways, I think I also have a tendency to get stuck trying to make something look perfect (I blame SolidWorks). I look forward to learning the details in the later courses!

🤘🏻