Mesh Normals and ASE File Format

Higuy

Hi everyone,

A friend and I have been working on our own engine for quite some time and recently we've been starting on adding big massive structures and other things to our game. Something I've been encountering is weird normals on my objects (which result in poor looking objects in game). Here is a picture illustrating the issue:



As you can notice, in Ficus, our engine, theres some really wierd normal issues on this test asset. I've gone into the normals editor modifier in max and tried to manually change them, but no luck there either. However, the problem seems to be there if select all normals and unify them in the normals editor. I'm starting to believe it might be the ASE file format we use for the engine and that they some how get unified on export. I've tried exporting with ASE WITHOUT "Mesh normals" checked and still have had zero luck... Does anyone have any experience with issues like this?

Quack!

It looks like it is dropping your smoothing groups. So in the export settings make sure that you are exporting normals and on import to the engine make sure they are intact.

On the left the mesh has 1 smoothing group, on the right, the correct amount.

Is there another model format that Ficus accepts? Try that.

Eric Chadwick

You should add a debug mode that shows you the normals.

I bet you're getting the middle result here, what Quack suggested.

Higuy

Thank you both for your insight, I managed to fix it by redoing the smoothing groups on the object in Max and it finally came out right after. Not sure what was wrong there but I ended up selecting everything, getting rid of the smoothing groups and literally hit "Auto Smooth" and it fixed it...

@Eric - I encountered these problems as well in a little program called Assimp Viewer, which actually allows you to switch between Smooth and Hard normals (in addition to the original ones) and started to get an idea of where to go from there. Interesting stuff!