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I have a cylinder with 24 faces that I tapered so it is shaped like a cone, but the normals get sharp looking, as you can see here: Notice the banding in the middle. The normals appear smooth toward the top and bottom.

The normals appear to be facing in the propper direction: enter image description here

I've tried "Shade smooth", I've tried adjusting the "auto smooth" and I've tried with and without end-cap faces, and I've tried with and without adding extra edge loops towards the top and bottom, and I've tried with and without extra subdivisions along the length of it. The faces are planar quads, so I'm unsure why they appear this way. Is there a way to fix this? It even shows up like this in Unity too.

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  • $\begingroup$ I can make it appear smooth by having lots of vertical subdivision to the point that the faces are more square than rectangular, but that's just "solving" the problem by creating another problem of having way too much geo. $\endgroup$
    – Ben Mora
    Commented Jan 17 at 13:52
  • $\begingroup$ Are you willing to consider shader-based solutions? $\endgroup$
    – Nathan
    Commented Jan 17 at 18:36
  • $\begingroup$ @Nathan, well, the thing is I am using this geo in Unity and specifically when I'm making my own shader for it it causes issues. My shader looks perfectly smooth until I do anything involving the normals. $\endgroup$
    – Ben Mora
    Commented Jan 17 at 22:34
  • $\begingroup$ That makes it sound like something else is your issue. I'd want to know what you're doing with normals. Specular? Or something different? In any case, you can make a perfect normal map for a cone using shader nodes-- but yeah, the geo leaves something to be desired, and although you can minimize the issue, I know of no way to get base normals on a cone perfect. Note that the simplest way to solve, good normals without too much geo, is to just bake high-to-low normals. $\endgroup$
    – Nathan
    Commented Jan 17 at 23:55
  • $\begingroup$ I'm simply adding a fresnel effect (dot product of normal direction and view direction). Even simply visualizing the normals (plugging normals straight into Albedo or Emission) reveals the terrible normals. What do you mean by "bake high-to-low normals?" $\endgroup$
    – Ben Mora
    Commented Jan 18 at 14:12

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The issue is due to "long inner" triangles.

To lower this effect, add some loop cuts:

enter image description here

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  • $\begingroup$ His comment under the question sounds as if this is not what he wants. But I would do it like that as well because that's basically the only way. $\endgroup$
    – Gordon Brinkmann
    Commented Jan 17 at 14:05
  • $\begingroup$ @GordonBrinkmann, Ben talk about a lot of vertical subdiv... I don't think four loop cuts is "a lot"... but we'll see! $\endgroup$
    – lemon
    Commented Jan 17 at 14:07
  • $\begingroup$ No, it isn't... but your cone is wider at the bottom. The narrower it is, the worse the shading gets ;) $\endgroup$
    – Gordon Brinkmann
    Commented Jan 17 at 14:38

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