Is there any way to smooth without nurms?

everytime i try to use nurms, it smooths it way too much. Even at 1 iteration, all my boxes become spheres almost, can someone plz help me

All smoothing algorithms will behave like this. You have to learn about some techniques of subdivision surface modeling to learn how to control the smoothed shape. For instance if you want to create a cube with smooth corners you can't just apply a smoothing algorithm to a cube. They will all turn it into a sphere. You have to use a bevel on the edges to increase the "weight" of the corners so the smoothed geometry is "drawn" to the corners. It's actually kind of tricky sometimes to control the derived surface exactly how you want it to look. I would search for subdivison modeling to find some information on how to control a derived surface correctly. I will pull some links that would be helpful to you and edit them in once I find them.

Edit:
A long read but lots of useful discussion in this thread about subdivision modeling.
http://www.cgtalk.com/showthread.php?s=&threadid=40373

This is a short discussion on a deceptively simple mechanical modeling problem. Wglwill is actually me ;) the people who replied gave some very good suggestions. This is a good example of complex methods of controlling the derived surface.
http://pub33.ezboard.com/fnendowings...icID=489.topic

A paper written by Bay Raitt discussing the behavior of derived surfaces.
http://www.izware.com/news/indexa446.html

I hope some of these resources prove helpful.

ok, thx, i kinda figured id end up having to chamfer to get my effect. Ok, so i have another question. If i have a box, with a pyramid on top of it (attached). When i use nurms, it basically turns the box into a sphere and leaves the pyramid without a bottom. why doesnt it keep them connected?

heres the first pic of my problem

(perspective)

and the second

Well it looks to me like the top object doesn't have it's vertices welded to the lower object, the bottom object looks like it has a closed face sitting against an open face on the top object, make sure you are connecting two holes together by welding the vertices.

but the top was beveled out? Are u saying that a beveled object becomes "detached". \

sounds like your having basic modelling problems.

first off:
MeshSmooth..... the farther apart two vertecies or edges are, the more MeshSmooth will "smooth" them. So if you have a box with only 12 sides, it will turn out to be rather sphericle when smoothed. however, if you add internal sides when creating the box, it will be more like a smoothed box rather than a sphere. this may sound weird and useless at first, but experience is everything my friend, work at Max until u get everything exactly how u want it. If you want a better quality effect while still keeping your model's original shape, you're gunna have to make the base model (no smooth) more detailed.

Welding: NEVER weld vertecies that make up internal faces. when u weld vertecies you should always be connecting two "holes" in the meshes. mesh smooth detects two completely different meshes and smooths them out separately unless you do this.

hope this helps, go to www.3dtotal.com for some tuts and www.3dkingdom.org for some high poly modelling examples

ok, thx. I got the part about adding detail before smoothing, but what about the bevel problem in picture 2. The piece that is disconnected and has no bottom was beveled, so why is it seperated?

when u vertex weld u have to attactch two "holes" not 1 hole to another closed set of polys