So I’ve got a rigged/skinned/animated character in Maya, with hard edges. In Unity the model displays with hard edges.
But I would like to have that model displayed with soft edges. So I open the Maya source file, soften the edges (Maya->Polygons->Normals->Soften Edge), export a new FBX, import it into Unity and it still has hard edges.
I go back into Maya, duplicate the mesh, soften the edges on the new duplicated model and copy the skin weights to the new model and delete the old model. So now the new model has soft edges applied before the skinCluster in Maya. Re-export/import into Unity and the rig still has hard edges!
So back in Maya I delete the joints. Re-export/import into Unity and I have proper soft edges.
So in conclusion, when bringing in the model with the joints I get a broken model (unwanted hard edges), no matter what I do and in what order. The moment I delete the joints, the unity model gets soft edges but I loose the rig and animations.
I would like to have soft edges on my model which has a rig and animations applied in Unity.
One way around this I found, is in Unity, if you select the top-level FBX of the rig/model and in the inspector, you can change “Normals” to “Calculate” and then adjust the “Smoothing Angle”. But ideally I would like Unity to just read in the normals I set in Maya.
Thanks for any help.
Best,
Adrian Melian
In Maya, model with soft edges
In Unity the same “soft edge” model imports with hard edges when a rig is also present.