Freelancer Modding Tutorials

[Dusty Lens]

= Modeling: Smooth/hard edges =

By Treewyrm

A very small part of my upcoming ship design/making guide, this little article covers one very small but also very important aspect of ship design and looks, namely smoothing groups and how they work in Freelancer.

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Surface smoothing is a technique used to create seemingly smooth, curved, relation between two and more polygons by grouping them into smooth groups. Most 3D modeling packages have this feature, and support it one way or another.

Freelancer supports surface smoothing but there is a difference in the way it works. Interestingly enough instead of grouping surfaces use UVW mapping to determine which polygons to group. I do not know whether it is because of 3DB/CMP exporter or is it how things work in Freelancer, but fact remains the same. Basically the rule is that if two adjacent polygons share edge in UVW map it will be smoothed. Break it and the shared edge will become hard. It's pretty simple.

Here is illustration to show you exactly. Bold green edges are UVW seams, they are hard edges. Thin white edges are smoothed in the resulting model in game, they are soft edges. I've also turned on hidden edges so you can see them as well.

Notice the short trim on the side across the main hull, as you can see shared edges are white and merged in UVW map, in the in-game model they will be smoothed, while bold green edges will be hard.

Knowing this you can now avoid unwanted smoothing and switch edges between soft and hard modes where you need them to be. Unlike smoothing groups in 3D modeling packages this method used in Freelancer has many limitations and in general requires specific approach to ship skinning. As I've already told before developers did not really skin those ships, instead they had many small seamless textures they used to give surfaces specific patterns, and through careful texture mapping creating the ships in the original game.

You can verify smoothing groups without going into game by importing back from CMP your model to Milkshape 3D.