hello, i am very new to max and modelling a car for a game. here is a screenshot: as you can see, there are parts which are smoothly shaded and parts which are flatly shaded. i mean that some edges are clearly visible while others are covered in a gradient. how did this happen? how can i change it? i suppose for a game i want all of it flatly shaded, right? i use nate's OBJ loader.

No real expreriance with 3dssmax, but with my experiance, that means that some triangles normals are pointing the wrong way(in game most loadters will cull those out, so they would disapear.

3ds max uses what they call "smoothing groups" to control the edges. Select a face, and you can assign the smoothing groups it belongs to in the edit mesh/poly settings. Any faces that share a smoothing group and share an edge will blend together to give smooth shading.

In-game you probably want to keep the hard/soft edges how you modelled them because they can be useful for making things look sharp or smooth. But I don't have a clue about how the OBJ format or nate's loader deals with the shading, so you may or may not have any choice.

thanks for the answers!!!

in 3d software packages i have used, there is a 'discontinuity' angle... i don't think it was called 'discontinuity', but it was something like that. anyway, if the angle between two edges was less than this value, the edge would appear smooth... else it would appear hard. so, for objects like gems or buildings you would put a discontinuity angle of 0.

edit: i have not used 3dsmax, so i guess this doesn't apply to your question.