Anyone knows polygons smoothing ?

I’ve seen somewhere something about polygon smoothing that make a characeter/object look better wihtout increasing the poly count.
I’ve seen 3dsmax pics with and w/o that effect activated and it’s awesome !
Anybody knows how to achieve that effect ?

Thanx.

You just have to average your normal vectors.

Average Normals for what?
For Lightning?

You have to pass vertexnormals. This is the same as normals for triangles, but you assign these to each vertex. What he ment about averaging normals, is that each vertexnormal is an average of the normals for each triangle connected to that vertex.

You can calculate the average normal, by adding all normals and then scale it to unitlength.

Thanx!