TurboSmooth and MeshSmooth - What's the difference?

[Morne]

Hi all

Well like the title says. Which one do you use and what is the advantages of it over the other?

[thablanch]

From the 3dsMax HelpFile:

The TurboSmooth modifier, like MeshSmooth, smoothes geometry in your scene. The differences between the two are as follows:

TurboSmooth is considerably faster and more memory-efficient than MeshSmooth. TurboSmooth also has an option for Explicit Normals, unavailable in MeshSmooth. See Explicit Normals.
TurboSmooth provides a limited subset of MeshSmooth functionality. In particular, TurboSmooth uses a single smoothing method (NURMS), can be applied only to an entire object, has no sub-object levels, and outputs a triangle-mesh object.


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But when collapsing the mesh, I had some weird results, once a while, with TurboSmooth... Some weird problems that I do not have with meshsmooth when collapsing the mesh.

[Morne]

so then is it safe to say that - like people use editable poly all the time instead of editable mesh - so also people use turbosmooth instead of meshsmooth?

[joconnell]

Yep - although turbosmooth can have a habit of getting corrupt some times. You'll see it yourself that the vertices in your object will go crazy and spike all over the place and it's just a case of deleting the turbo smooth and applying a new one. With the mesh smooth modifier though you have some parameters that can be useful - for exampling in quad output and classic mode, you've got options about strength which are quite handy - rather than splitting every edge evenly down the middle and softening the look of your mesh, you can turn down the strength amount to about 0.1 and it's more like doing a chamfer on every face - it keeps more of the form of your original object.

Turbosmooth is far quicker though.