Is there anyway to achieve the flat shading look without exploding? I’m working with a high poly model (500k) and want the flat shading look as smooth shading makes the model appear distorted. I’m not interested in texture mapping as the purpose of the model is to view detail up close and a texture map wouldn’t look all that great up close (my opinion).

Anyway, I brought the model in via Prefab3D (AS export), once without exploding and didn’t like the look of the smooth shading, so did it again this time exploding. Got the look I wanted but the final swf file jumped from 10MB to 17MB, even though both still run right at 29fps (OpenGL) - so no performance issues so far (Stage3D is amazing).

This is for a desktop application (possibly moving to tablets in the future) so I’m not concerned about download time, but still would like to keep the final swf file as small as possible.

Any thoughts?

If all else fails I can probably remove some detail form the model and maybe get the model down to 300K polys.

Thanks
Dave

There is no way of having sharp edges without “exploding” the two faces that meet at that edge, because the affected vertices need to have different normals. You don’t have to “explode” all faces though. Just separate the ones surrounding the edges that you want to make harder. This is a modeling task, that could be automated using a threshold. For example, the experimental AWD exporter for Blender uses a threshold to make all edges above a certain angle hard, but other edges smooth (by sharing normals.)