modo normal problem

rooster

hey all- I've got a bunch of undulating tiles which are flat at the edges where I want them to join, which I want to use in a seperate editor to piece together. I'd like the normals on their edges to be pointing perfectly upwards so when I place separate tiles together the lighting will be unified at the joins. Currently, modos default normals causes seams to show at the edges.

Is there any way I can force select vert normals to point upwards using modo? I can't find any normal editing tools

thanks!
-Rich

Farfarer

Normal editing in modo's a bit of a pain.

There's a Vertex Normal vertex map you can add to set explicit normals.

I'm not 100% sure how you go about editing them other than setting an explicit value through the Vertex Map >Set Value tool. Which you have to do for each component of the normal

There's Vertex Map > Set Normals that'll bake the current normals to the selected normal vertex map (or create a new one if one doesn't exist)... but that's not too useful in this context.

Swizzle

For something like this you'd need the vertex editing capabilities of something like Max. Unfortunately Modo is pretty stupid when it comes to anything having to do with vertex normals.

Frankie

try this,

select all edge verts, under lists (where uv maps and morph maps are) go to other maps and make a new normal map (this is stored per vertex not an image) then go to info and you have other.X other.Y other.Z (or whatever you called it) and you can change them to 0,1,0. Perhaps you can use a morph map to flatten the whole mesh and then generate the map from there.

Personally I'd try and get away with adding another loop around the edge that step was unnecessary.

Edit: whoops I didn't read what Talon said properly, he already covered it.