Broken Normals?

PaulPer

Was fixing a seam on a front facing panel on a model and did the proper steps adding vertices, adjusting the vertices, set to face the normals and even went to a side perspective and aligned as many vertices to the common curvature as i could yet i still get these non-perpendicular normals.

Any ideas what could be causing this?

EarthQuake

Need more information.

3D software? What are you trying to do exactly? More context in general?

PaulPer

Maya, fixing an error that happened at several curves along a front panel's surface

PaulPer

The original model had faces overlapping the opening rim where a button goes.
I inserted vertices and adjusted them so that the areas where it was supposed to be visible were visible and the area around the trim of the panel were seamless

EarthQuake

Still not enough information.

Are you actively creating the model, and using some sort of tool that is causing the issue? What is the greater context of the asset (zoom out to get us an idea of what this is and why it is wrong)?

Are you setting up smoothing or something like that? You mention normals, so I would assume you're adjusting the mesh normals/smoothing of the mesh, but you're showing something that could be some sort of bevel tool error or I don't really know what.

Don't assume we know what you're talking about, provide excessive detail so it's easy for someone reading to help you.

PaulPer

I'm working with a model given to me by an outside company for my work to use in promotional material.
The model came as a STP file and only surfaces, I converted it to polygons to work on it


I haven't used any bevel tools.
Initially when I was adding the vertices, half of each face tweaked turned pitch black and the other half was the proper texture, but set face to normals fixed that part.
It's supposed to be a smooth surface, like the front panel of a radio but the areas I tweaked have non smooth surfaces from this.
Could it be the vertices aren't perfectly smooth along the surface?
When I toggle show normals they're not uniform either
When I was moving vertices I had snap enabled to align them perfectly with the button trim's rim so I'm wondering if that contributed to it.

jStins

It might be easier to see what's going on if you can visualize the mesh triangles (display>polygons>face triangles). You should also try unlocking the normals to make sure any normal edits you make are actually being applied to the mesh. 

PaulPer

So I isolated the area with the face for a better visual.


the top areas are supposed to be missing out of the square.
The 'triangles' that are out of place around the button openings are the issue at hand

Axi5

In Display Attributes can you enable vertex normals instead of face normals? The two are different, just because the face normals are all pointing the same way does not mean that the vertex normals are. Also that topology is pretty awful and could be cleaned up a whole bunch.

Here:
https://knowledge.autodesk.com/support/maya/learn-explore/caas/CloudHelp/cloudhelp/2018/ENU/Maya-Modeling/files/GUID-9C257D44-924D-4B3F-ADEF-C71FAA98EAB1-htm.html

PaulPer

Axi5 said:

In Display Attributes can you enable vertex normals instead of face normals? The two are different, just because the face normals are all pointing the same way does not mean that the vertex normals are. Also that topology is pretty awful and could be cleaned up a whole bunch.

I toggled it and the vertex normals nearby the topology issues at hand aren't parallel to the other vertices 

EarthQuake

Have you verified that this surface is actually flat? It may be that there isn't anything wrong with the normals/shading, just that the geometry got a bit wonky when converting from cad to polygons.

PaulPer

The surface is fairly flat, I went into side view and flattened as many vertices that i could to a common line.

I think it got wonky while adding vertices to fix the holes.

Here, I have a toggled instance of the before set up with the corners I corrected that caused the issue

So in the various holes there were incomplete corners which I fixed

When I overlap them you can see the diagonals much more clearly

So for each diagonal(inside the big opening and the smaller 5), I added vertices, adjusted nearby vertices, did cleanup on the NGONS and wound up where I am now with the topology issues

jStins

'Fairly flat' is quite different than flat with topology like this. Even a slight variation from planar can cause the shading issues you're seeing. Try selecting all the verts and scaling them to zero on the perpendicular axis to make sure it's planar. 

You'd also probably save time in the long run if you cleaned up the mesh as Axi5 mentioned. 

Axi5

As a test for me can you do this:

Go to Mesh Display > Set Vertex Normal (Options)

In the options go to Edit > Reset then apply it.

If the mesh goes black, re-open it and change the X value to -1 and apply it again.

If it works, perform a merge vertex command and delete history.

PaulPer

It looks like the issue is gone!

Thank you for the help!
So was it probably the vertex adjusting initially that caused it?

PaulPer

What causes the 'half-black half textured' issue when adding vertices to a face? 
Is that probably a buggy normal of an N-gon?
Thought I'd check from something I encountered but resolved before on my own