Smooths the selected polygon mesh by adding divisions to the polygons on the mesh.
You can repeatedly smooth selected polygonal faces if you keep clicking the Smooth or Apply button in the options window.
The Exponential and Linear smoothing options both smooth equally, but they offer different controls for the resulting topology. For example, Exponential has an option to maintain soft and hard edges, while Linear has options to better control the number of resulting faces.
You can switch between the two methods after you’ve smoothed by changing the Method attribute on the polySmoothFace node.
The following options are available when you choose Exponentially as the Subdivision Method.
Applies the same smoothing operation to the UVs as to the vertices. Smooth UVs is on by default, providing better results for UVs.
Turn off Smooth UVs if you want to maintain compatibility with scenes created in older versions of Maya, or if the UVs do not need to be smoothed and you want to improve performance.
Specifies what components will remain unaffected during the Smooth.
Preserves the properties of any existing manually hardened or softened edges. If you have changed the hardness or softness of edges (Normals > Soften Edge or Normals > Harden Edge), turn this option on to maintain those settings.
The following options are available when you set the Smooth Add Divisions setting to Linearly. The Linear smoothing method gives you more control over the number of faces resulting from the smooth, especially the Divisions per face attribute.
Do not use the Linear method on a surface with faces that have more than four edges. The resulting smooth surface will be uneven. Use Mesh > Triangulate or Mesh > Cleanup before performing the smooth.
Increases the number of faces in smaller increments than Division levels. Using this option, you can more easily achieve a balance between smoothness and a low polygon count.
The face count increases as a result of dividing each face. Maya divides each face by splitting the existing edges. The value you set is the number of splits Maya performs. When Divisions per face is set to 1 each edge is split once, a value of 2 will split each edge twice, and so on.
Creates a bulge in the surface by scaling vertices around the center of the original faces. Higher values scale these vertices outward and lower values scale them back. For Roundness to have an effect, Push Strength must be greater than zero.
Mesh > Smooth and Proxy > Subdiv Proxy each output the polygon vertex order differently. If you need to perform operations that require identical topologies, for example, when using Blend Shape, you may wish to use the same smoothing tool for smoothing the polygon meshes to avoid unexpected results.
