To understand what smooth in shipdata.plist actually means, I suggest reading the Wikipedia article on Gouraud shading. yes, it uses funny words like “surface normal”, but understanding such concepts will make you a better modeller.Griff wrote:re: making objects appear more rounded, you could try using the the 'smooth' option in the shipdata .plist, it gets oolite to recalculate the lighting on the model a bit differently than normal, works great on more 'organic' shapes like asteroids, but also looks cool on sphere's, cylinders etc.
The weakness in interpolation mentioned in that text (and demonstrated in the animation) does not apply to Oolite when shaders are enabled (the default shader uses Phong interpolation), but the averaging of surface normals remains the same. In particular, this means that using smooth in models with sharp corners (as seen in Commies.oxp, for instance) does not provide any “smoothness”, it just produces a horrible mess.