Smooth polygon meshes

There may be times when your polygon mesh does not appear as smooth as you would like. Maya provides several methods for smoothing polygons:

• Mesh > Smooth: Maya modifies the polygon mesh by adding new polygons and smoothing out vertices and their connected edges. For more information see To smooth by adding polygons below.
• Mesh > Average Vertices: Maya averages the values of the vertices to produce a smoother surface without modifying the topology. Average Vertices is useful when you want to maintain the existing polygon count in a mesh. For more information see To smooth by adding vertices below.
• Proxy > Subdiv Proxy: Displays both a smoothed version of the polygon mesh as well as the original unsmoothed version so you can edit and animate the mesh more easily. For more information see Preview a smoothed polygonal mesh.
• Mesh > Sculpt Geometry Tool: The Sculpt Geometry Tool smooths the polygon mesh by letting you manually modify the position of polygon vertices using a brush paradigm. This lets you smooth local regions of the mesh and does not modify the topology. For more information see Smooth a surface mesh.
  Tip

  If you are using mental ray rendering, you can also smooth polygon meshes at render time using the Approximation Editor. See Smooth polygon meshes at render time for more information.

To smooth by adding polygons

1. Select the mesh or just the faces you want to smooth.
2. Select Mesh > Smooth.
   

To smooth by moving vertices

1. Select the mesh or just the vertices you want to smooth.
2. Select Mesh > Average Vertices.
   Note

   You can apply this action repeatedly to smooth more and more (use the ‘g’ hotkey to repeat the last action), or you can choose Mesh > Average Vertices > and set a specific Smoothing amount.

Troubleshooting the Smooth feature

Smooth works strangely or not at all?

Smoothing works with convex and even star-shaped concave faces. However, it can give unwanted results with concave faces where the center point is not inside the face.

To fix a concave faces, use the Split Polygon Tool or Mesh > Triangulate.

Related topics

• Preview a smoothed polygonal mesh
• Mesh > Average Vertices
• Mesh > Smooth

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