another question on autosmooth

ok, I tried the soften operation on this, which results in a definite bug. I highlighted two rows of adjacent faces, hit soften button in objects operation panel. Result was the program locked up for a minute, then exploded my entire model into a spectre that would scare the pants off a sea urchin. I tried this once, shut down the program, opened it up again, same result a second time.

I’ll try rebooting and do it one more time, but this doesn’t seem to be working well.

I’m working up a model for the latest contest, commited to smooth level 2, then decided I needed to tweek a few details, such as adding some depth to the eyelids.

To do so, I grabbed a row of edges above each of the eyes, moved them back a little. The faces effected by the edges moved no longer autosmooth with the rest of the model. Is it supposed to do this?

Unfortunately, I also compacted, which might not have been a good move, in that I can no longer undo the smooth level 2 commitment, unless I go back to an earlier file I saved which had much less work at that point. (I typically save 4 or 5 vrsions of a file as I progress, just in case I really dislike the outcome or royally screw it up)

I would be fairly satisfies with the model, though not done tweeking, if I could resolve the lack of autosmooth around the moves edges. I have done other tweeking, such as a couple of minor warps, no ill effect.

I can still undo the eyelid edge move, but really wanted the depth.

Any suggestions of ways to make the autosmooth work where it is not?

Try turning on auto smooth again – now you can move the cage around the eyes and get the smoothing effect.
(although this will also quadruple the face count of your model)
Another way (not checked) would be to select the eye faces and try the soften operation – might help ?

sounds like a plan… only… how do do do that?
If you mean turn off smooth level from properties, too late for that, my scene was creeping and I compacted the file, or is it compress… anyway, I can’t delete smooth level 2 now.

So you can turn off autosmooth? Where do I do that? (ran a search in help files, not found)

I may just try selecting the offending faces and run a soften on them as you suggest, I don’t guess I would be disqualified.