Mesh > Smooth

Smooths the selected polygon mesh by adding divisions to the polygons on the mesh.

Mesh > Smooth >

TipYou can repeatedly smooth selected polygonal faces if you keep clicking the Smooth or Apply button in the options window.

Subdivision Method: Two smoothing methods are possible:

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.

Exponential Controls

The following options are available when you choose Exponentially as the Subdivision Method.

Division levels: Use the slider or type a number in the Division levels box to increase or decrease the number of times Maya performs the smoothing operation. This also increases or decreases the object’s smoothness. The Division levels range is from 1 to 4. The higher the value, the smoother the object.
Continuity: The value you enter here determines the degree of smoothness.
Smooth UVs: 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.
Propagate Edge Hardness: Copies the edge hardness values from any hardened edges on the original mesh to the associated new edges on the Smooth Mesh preview. The default setting is off.

Map borders

Controls how borders are smoothed when Smooth UVs is on.

Do not smooth: Borders are not smoothed.
Smooth internal: Internal borders are smoothed. This is the default setting.
Smooth all: All UV borders are smoothed.

Preserve

Specifies what components will remain unaffected during the Smooth.

Geometry borders: When turned on (the default), this option preserves the properties of the border edges of the mesh. It controls the Keep Border attribute of the PolySmoothFace node.
Selection borders: When turned on (default), this option preserves the properties of the edges bordering the selected and non-selected faces.
Hard edges: 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.
Tessellation: Turn this option on so that when changes are made to the history nodes, the smooth node does not redo the tesselation, but just repositions the generated vertices.

Linear Controls

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.

Division levels: The number of times Maya performs smoothing. The higher the value, the smoother the object and the more faces are generated.

NoteChanging both Division levels and Divisions per face settings can create a very large number of faces on the mesh, causing a reduced interactive performance of the Maya application.
Divisions per face: 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.
Push strength: Controls the overall volume of the resulting smoothed mesh. Higher values scale the mesh outward while lower values scale it back. The default setting is 1.
Roundness: 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.

Note 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.