Design Nomenclature / Digital Model Making
Smoothing
Also called relax, shade smooth, smooth shading, Laplacian smoothing
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.