Mesh Faces Shade Smooth

The opposite number to Mesh Faces Shade Flat: this sets the selected faces to smooth shading, interpolating normals across face boundaries so a low-poly surface reads as curved instead of visibly faceted. No geometry changes - it's purely a rendering flag.

How it works

It wraps Blender's mesh.faces_shade_smooth operator. Flip it on a run of connected faces, and the hard edges between them stop showing up as visible creases in lighting; the surface looks like it's rounding continuously even though the underlying triangle count didn't change. This matters a lot on Avatar Graph meshes specifically, because the geometry is usually built cheaply - planes, insets, fills - rather than sculpted with the density you'd need for actual smooth curvature. Smooth shading is the trick that makes a cheek or an eyeball built from a handful of faces look rounded instead of like a cut gemstone.

The tradeoff worth knowing: smooth shading blends normals everywhere along the selection unless something tells it not to. If a face genuinely should stay crisp - a hard edge you don't want blended away - pair this with Mesh Mark Sharp (or leave that edge's faces out of the selection) rather than smoothing indiscriminately across the whole mesh.

The inputs and outputs that matter

• BPY_OBJ (optional) - the mesh, with the faces you want smooth-shaded already selected.

No other parameters - this is a straight on/off flag applied to whatever's selected. Output is the same BPY_OBJ.

How to install it

ComfyUI Manager: search "Avatar Graph" and install. Manually:

cd ComfyUI/custom_nodes
git clone https://github.com/avatechai/avatar-graph-comfyui

then pip install -r requirements.txt and restart. Needs Blender's bpy module, pinned to Python 3.10.x - a dedicated conda environment on macOS/Linux, or Avatech's prebuilt Python-3.10 ComfyUI zip on Windows with the pack layered on via Manager.

Common issues & troubleshooting

Smooth shading with no visible change usually means the selection feeding BPY_OBJ is empty or off-target - check the node upstream that's supposed to select the faces you want smoothed.

If parts of the mesh look smooth in Blender but come out with hard shading edges after export, or vice versa, that's typically the exporter or destination viewer recalculating normals on its own rather than trusting the flag this node set - GLB/GLTF pipelines especially tend to bake normals at export time, so verify the look post-export rather than assuming what you see in Blender is final.

If smoothing makes an edge you actually wanted crisp go soft and blurry-looking, that's this node doing exactly what it's told - smooth shading has no concept of "except this one edge" on its own. Mark that edge sharp first, or exclude its faces from the selection before running this node.