Smoothing issue?

#1 It would appear that the normals are a bit messed up, i'm not entirely sure about how to do it in milkshape but look around for things about Normals and try and mess around with the angle of it, and try flatshading it slightly if there's an option for that in there too.

#2 That...makes sense. I suspect you've gotten me pointed in the right direction--thanks!

I'll post the Milkshape solution when I find it.

#3 Hmm, that's strange. In LightWave, it would look like that before merging points. The normals must be the problem.

#4 Weld all then go back and put the normals into smoothing groups...I see unwelded seams and bad shading going on...you can't change the normal shading angle[ie, threshold of that group] in Ms3d. Flatshading is not a Material parameter that parses out of Ms3d, you'll have to do it with Smoothing Groups.

Smooth All, I think, puts all normals into one single Smoothing Group...which is not the way to go, because the 'threshold' in ms3d for shading is like ~89/90 degrees and 'fixed' at that value, prolly why, Mete, gave us 32 groups to work with...;)

I"m smoothing a vehicle shape right now...and it has removed those badly shaded normals that are dark...and put seams where they normally fall and catch light.

#5 I think I'm starting to comprehend. What I did was I made a straight track by extruding from three faces. I extruded about 30 times, creating a segmented track. Then I rotated the segments incrementally to make the loop.

So my question is...trying to comprehend how to use the smoothing groups here...which faces do I want to have in a single smoothing group? In principle and also specifically with a shape like this?

#6 BTW I ended up fixing it cheap by using the Autosmooth function in Ultimate Unwrap, using the surface normals option.