Weird smoothing issue when converting to editable poly - 3ds max

[pikok]

Hi.
I just came across a strange behaviour - I have a liquid sim - with 50 smoothing iterations. When I convert it to a poly, smoothing is gone, as if I set it to 0. What's going on?

[vladimir_krastev]

Hi could you send us a scene that illustrates the issue through our contact form

[Svetlin.Nikolov]

Hey pikok , I just reproduced the problem here.

So when Phoenix smooths the mesh, it smooths out both the vertices, and the normals.

If you convert to editable Poly, the vertex smoothing is preserved, but the normals smoothing is lost.

Instead, if you convert to and editable Mesh, both the vertex and normals smoothing is preserved.

Also, note that if you apply an Edit Poly modifier instead of converting to Editable Poly, 3ds Max will also keep both the smoothed vertices and the smoothed normals, without losing them.

Would any of these two workarounds work for you?

[pikok]

Hi svetlin. That's exactly what is happening. I often use phoenix for modelling, so I ofter convert to edit poly, but had no problems with it previously or haven't noticed.
So phoenix is baking some extra smooth normals into the mesh during "smoothing" process? So this is some sort of visual trickery?
I don't quite understand the whole process. I'm familair with smoothing groups and normals maps, but this is new
What I find most interesting is that the resulting "ugly" mesh is actually smooth. There's no facetting - it's all in one smoothing group. I can't wrap my head around it, really.
I tried your solutions, but when I convert Mesh to Poly - also normals gone
After aplying Edit Poly and collapsing the stack - also normals gone

[Svetlin.Nikolov]

Visual trickery indeed

The working solutions I found are:
- Convert to Mesh instead to Poly
- Apply an Edit Poly modifier, but do not collapse the stack.