Smoothing overview

Methods of smoothing

There are a number of ways you can smooth a polygon mesh in Maya, each offering their own advantages and disadvantages.

Smooth mesh preview

Smooth mesh preview quickly shows you how a polygon mesh will appear when smoothed, without actually smoothing the mesh.

This mode is ideal for tweaking your mesh prior to an actual smooth mesh operation, to ensure the end result looks as close to your desired result as possible. You can also use it to smooth without recording any history and allows you to make changes to the components on the smooth mesh preview itself without the cage necessarily being visible.

For more information, see Preview a smoothed polygonal mesh.

Subdiv Proxy

Unlike the smooth mesh preview, a subdiv proxy actually creates a smoothed mesh and places it inside the original mesh. These two meshes are linked via their construction history. Any edits you make to the original mesh are reflected on the smoothed version underneath.

In most cases, a smooth mesh preview is superior to a subdiv proxy. However there are a few times when you would want to use a subdiv proxy, which are:

When you need a linear smooth.
When you want to see the effect of particle collision on your smoothed object prior to actually smoothing it.
When you want to quickly setup a mirrored smooth operation.

For more information, see Work with polygon meshes using Subdiv Proxy.

Subdivision Surface

A subdivision surface allows you to subdivide specific regions of a mesh. This gives you the ability finely tune or smooth certain areas without changing the entire mesh.

Subdivision surfaces help you keep a lower geometry count since they only insert control points where you need them (instead of uniformly across the mesh). However, it is also has the slowest performance of the three smoothing methods. Subdivision surfaces are largely unsupported in pipelines outside of Maya, meaning you have to convert them to polygons or NURBS before exporting to these pipelines.

For more information, see What are subdivision surfaces?

Smooth method	Advantages	Disadvantages	When to use?
Smooth Mesh Preview	Best performance No additional geometry created	Can’t be smoothed linearly More complicated mirror setup Cannot collide with particles	In most cases you will want to use a smooth mesh preview When you want to see the effects of a smooth operation When you want to make changes to a smooth mesh by modifying its less complicated un-smoothed counterpart
Subdiv Proxy	Allows for linear smoothing Provides 1-click mirror smoothing Allows you to see the effect of particle collisions	Increases the polycount	When you need to perform a linear smooth When you want to see the effect of particle collision on your smoothed object, prior to smoothing If you want to perform a mirrored smooth (though this can be recreated in a smooth mesh preview with a few extra steps)
Subdivision Surface	Allows you to increase detail only in areas of the mesh that need it Allows you to affect the mesh in different levels of detail	Slowest performance No external pipeline support (without first converting to polygons)	When modeling objects that are not going to be rigged When modeling a with the intention of converting to NURBS

Smoothing equivalents in 3ds Max

In Maya, the polygon smooth feature ( Mesh > Smooth) works by adding divisions to the polygon mesh. However, the smooth feature in Autodesk 3ds Max works by averaging existing components. This is much closer to Maya’s Average Vertices ( Mesh > Average Vertices) feature.