Pistol Pete

Limit is already 40. Doesn't seem to be a phong problem. I simply started from scratch and everything is good now. Very weird stuff.

I've never seen this strange shading before. What could it be?

Here's a good exemple of the problem. As you can see on the right, my Camera is not selected. However, in the Camera menu on the left, you can clearly see that it is indeed my Camera that's selected. Weird stuff.

Usually, when I want to switch from my Camera view to the default camera view, I simply deselect my active Camera in the Objects window (small white botton). Curiously, sometimes this doesn't work. I need to go to the Camera menu on the left and select Default Camera. Anyone has ever experienced this same issue?

Is it the phong angle? It seems to fix it when I select: Style=Angle and Area Weighted / Phong Angle=180

I'm wondering however what this curious shading is on my object. Very odd. Any idea what that is?

Thanks. This is what I did and it worked well. Thought maybe there was a special technique or trick.

I am looking for a technique to model connecting pipes without subdivision surface. Any idea how this can be done?

Thanks for the precision. I will focus on the second number since my goal is to render quicker. I'm working with huge SolidEdge files which contain millions on polygons. I need to know if it's worth it to redo objects with very high polygon counts. For that, I need to avoid using SDS since it jacks up polygon count considerably. In the attached image, you can see an original SolidEdge object on the right, and on the left, my C4D version. 449 polygons compared to 6,400 originally. Big improvement.

I did a test with just a bunch of cube objects. I still get that number of polygons in parentheses. Very strange.

This is curious because I barely use SDS in this project and I have almost 4 times the number of generated polygones!

When I have nothing selected and I right-click on my viewport and select Project Information, I see information on the polygon counts. What is the number in parenthesis?

Thanks Imashination.

Interesting technique Clarence. But what about camera position and calibration? Do you manually move the camera until you get a fairly realistic camera angle or do you use the camera calibration tag? Also, shadow catcher is not very user-friendly in V-Ray so I added the shadow in post following a render I did with the floor.

Here's the original background image. Maybe you can try to calibrate a camera for it to see if this is possible. Thanks.