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Finally!!! The Best Detailed Shading Video Ever!!! 👍😎✨️

This is a good summary for beginners on the basics of shading problems and why they happen and how to fix them most of time.

Thank you! I'm a noob and you just explained the reasons for the shading errors I've had.

Now my very basic noob model looks like a nicely shaded very basic noob model 🙂

Nothing beats 3ds Max 20 year old shading, which is smartly carried over to subdivision

thanks a lot, man. Very helpful

Very, very good one!

amazing thanks

A video about how to split huge assets and modify the parts when they have to stack edge to edge but seams can't be covered by a decorative extra mesh piece would have been great.
Exactly the situation I'm facing, and I have to split the assets, otherwise they can't be lightmapped or textured with a good level of details. Most of them are close 70 x 21 metres in size, one is 70 x 21 x 26 metres.
There are no guides on this type of situation.

If the end result is rendering with Cycles, don't ignore faking it with the bevel material node. Never had the need to, but I'm sure it can be baked down as well if needed, just like a high poly model. With complex imported CAD models where you just can't fiddle around and clean up proper forever, that's my go to solution. Also I tend to use bevel modifier harden normals for almost everything, weighted normals is a rarity, and data transfer when everything else fails. I would think most use cases for modelling objects for own projects are usable assets where you can get away with fakery, rather than hero assets of "simple forms".

Edit: Caution; note that harden normals will produce additional "islands" if Geometry/Random per Island is required used. If this is the case, you can create your own "islands" with UV maps and collapse each island to a point and use snap(0.01)->white noise. I use this for slat walls all the time; random view->UV project from view->collapse each slat to its own point in UV space. Here keeping that flat shading is important since the slats are very long and thin objects, and the shading error becomes very visible on a fairly dominating object. The randomness is used to drive texture offsets with simple box mapping.

If I know the shader in the end will contain bumps and have roughness, I can also chose to ignore it - I'm the only one who will ever "notice". Note that a bevel with superellipse set to 0.75 will produce far better curvature transitions than a fixed radius (0.5) bevel. This can be important an factor with industrial design, but I never see hard surface modelers (I'm not one of them, I suck a modelling) even talk about it. Requires more segments and depth, but also minimizes the error on the next flat surface. Check the difference with a zebra stripe matcap. Or lookup surfacing tutorials for CAD on the topics of types of curvature, zebra stripes, curvature combs, and surface analysis tools.

Oh, and don't forget you can abuse the object scale system to produce elliptic fillets too. Scale up, apply, do the circular bevel, scale down, apply, circular is squished.

The matcap you use, on a static object even, doesn't show well the difference of those flattened normals. But again, this matters more on objects with clear defined and sharp reflections. Can also add additional holding loops to force the flatness without any further tricks. And I don't really see a problem with mixed bevel weights as long as they don't blend into each other.

In Star Citizen everything is completely fucked up.

Stop with the room temp IQ hand movements. I can't stand it.