smoothing groups

I can't believe I'm posting about smoothing groups as they typically do what I expect... but not in Hammer...

Has anyone else gotten them to make any difference on the way brushes render in game? I've got a few large 12 cylinders brushes and have added each of their faces to a smoothing group, yet in-game they still have the very obvious edges on them. Shouldn't the smoothing groups smooth out the way light hits them so that you don't see a hard edge (or at least improve it)?

I created a test map with two identical cylinders, one with faces belonging to the same smoothing group, and one with faces belong to no smoothing groups... Yes, the level is lit, so it's not a fullbright problem... both cylinders look identical.

Anybody run into this? Anyone ever seen a difference between using them and not using them? Thanks in advance!

I've used them a couple of times in dm_echo and they seem to have made a difference, but it might just be other changes I made for the same compile that made it so. As you would guess, they appear to have smoothed out the lighting across the inside faces of an arched ceiling.

I can't believe I'm posting about smoothing groups...

I'm taking a wild guess here (not being rude just trying to rule out video settings), what advanced video settings are you using? It would make sense to turn it off at lower settings if it's dynamic lighting. However if it is static lighting it should be done in the rad process and settings should not affect it.

Just asking, if I'm lucky it helped you out.

It should be static, as I imagine all it is doing is smoothing out the values of the lightmaps of consecutive faces to get rid of harsh lighting transitions.

Here is a split-screen of the same column, the left is not smoothed, and the right one is.



What smooth groups do is try and make the lighting on all group members
similar. This does nothing to geometrically smooth your map, but
it sure makes it look that much nicer.