Design Nomenclature / Digital Model Making
Smoothing
Also called relax, shade smooth, smooth shading, Laplacian smoothing
This entry has not been translated yet and is shown in English.
Two different things under one word. Mesh smoothing — relax — moves vertices toward the average of their neighbours, evening out spacing and losing volume as it goes. Smooth shading changes no geometry at all: it interpolates normals across faces so a faceted surface reads as curved. The silhouette gives it away.
In practice
“Smooth it” in a review nearly always means shade smooth, or add subdivision. Relax is a topology tool used during retopology, and pushed hard it shrinks the model.
Not to be confused with
- Subdivision SurfaceA smooth limit surface defined by a coarse control mesh — the cage — plus a refinement rule applied repeatedly. You edit the cage; the surface you see is derived from it and lies inside it. Sharpness comes from local density or explicit creases, not from a curve degree.
- Catmull-ClarkThe subdivision rule for quad-dominant meshes: each face yields a face point, each edge an edge point, and original vertices move toward the average of their neighbours. Every face becomes a quad after one step, whatever the input — triangles and n-gons are converted, not preserved.