Edit normals

McGreed

So I'm looking into Edit Normals, trying to reduce polycount and avoid using normal map to get soft edges, however it seem to be kinda tedious to work with. Any change to the mesh seem to fuck up the normals again after editing them.

Any advise or suggestions to how to use them? Especially, how much is it actually used in a normal productline?

Bal

Are you doing it manually? Usually when I want to edit normals, I always want to do the same operation (align towards or outwards from the selected face).
If you're in Max and not using it already, you should check out SyncViewS script from this thread (link in his last post): http://www.polycount.com/forum/showthread.php?t=75753&page=2

passerby

never edit the normals after your normalmap bake, is hte first bit, and what i find the most useful thing is to align verxtex normals to the face normals.

maya has a tool to do this built in and in bal's link there is a maxscript to do it on hte max side of things.

McGreed

Bal, ahh cheers, will look at it when I get home.

passerby, yeah that figures, I wanted to just edit normals instead of baking things like edges, and then add details to it with normalmap with photoshop. Will the normalmap still be affected then? Since its just things like insets, bolts, damage etc.

passerby

really depends, so your normal map isnt baked?

what i said really olny applied to baked normalmap, adding things like insets, and bolts and crap to the flat surfaces of the prop with NDO2 or CB, wont messing things up.

the problem is when you, bake a normalmap from a high poly to get things like nice smooth edge highlights, or to make shapes look rounder, baker looks at the lowpoly normals, so if those normal facings in the low poly change and there isn't a rebake it messes things right up, since the normalmap is no longer synced with teh low poly, and it;s no longer properly correcting it;s normals.