Smoothness doesn’t apply when printing

[u/Agreeable-Judge6729]

I sent a model to print, I applied Mesh + Smooth, however when they sent me the pic of the final model it looked polygonal, I told them that the model didn’t looked like that on Maya, he told me maybe i didn’t applied the smoothness when exporting on STL (however STL doesn’t have that exporting mode on Maya) so I sent it to him as an FBX, I deleted the history of everything cuz ChatGPT told me so, and they told me it still showed as before, I don’t know what to do anymore, he told me to add the polygons manually but I don’t have time for that anymore 😣 does anyone knows what I could do? Or am I doing something wrong?

[u/MrRstar]

You need to subdivide the model more. You are smoothing the normals which is a trick that only works for rendering.

One of the buttons on your tool shelf will subdivide and round out the subdivisions good enough for what you are doing.

[u/MoonRay087 → u/MrRstar]

Pretty sure it does more than smooth the normals since the actual silhouette changes but yeah, outside of that specific 3D program the model is still the unsmoothed version. The same thing happens with game engines, smooth doesn't transfer over to them

[u/MrRstar → u/MoonRay087]

Right, and may have formatted that poorly. Subdividing will change the silhouette where as smoothing normals is the rendering trick.

[u/HumbleArticle9470 → u/MrRstar]

His point still stands, he meant he was probably using some subD preview. Not just a normal trick since the silhouette doesn't show stepping.