Smoothing groups
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The cylinder on the left is not smoothed.
The cylinder in the middle is smoothed with the default lightmap scale of 16.
The cylinder on the right is smoothed with a lightmap scale of 8.
The cylinder in the middle is smoothed with the default lightmap scale of 16.
The cylinder on the right is smoothed with a lightmap scale of 8.
Vertex Smoothing simply uses Vertex normals (vectors) as if they were Surface normals to generate a kind of pseudo-subdivision surface for the Lighting shader to work with. This is generally considered a form of phong shading, not to be confused phong speculars.
When a number of adjacent surfaces are assigned to the same Smoothing group, the Rendering Engine will "soften" the light and shadow across each vertex or edge shared by the group. This makes the geometry seem smoother when viewed from most angles. It does not soften the profile or silhouette of the object.
Bug:In 
Source 2013 and possibly other engine branches, smoothing groups are not properly written for func_detail brush faces. This is fixed in the 
Slammin' Source Map Tools and 
Mapbase versions of VBSP, and code for this fix can be found in pull request 391 on GitHub. [todo tested in ?]Guidelines
- Brush geometry must be manually assigned to a Smoothing Group in Hammer. Model geometry smoothing data is configured in the model editor before SMD export.
Auto Smoothing
- In at least some games, VRAD will auto smooth angles (between faces without smoothing groups) which are less than or equal to the -smooth parameter (default 45).
Confirm:Any games other than CSGO?
