Normals issue?

Elodin

Hi all,

I'm not sure what is it and how to fix it. Sometimes I get that on the models.

Does anybody know what are those black lines (because they appear in the engine as well)? And how to fix them?

AlecMoody

It looks like very thin triangles or triangles without any area (as in all 3 point lie on a line). Try sliding one of those verts around and see if you find the issue.

It could also be auto-triangulating a quad or Ngon badly.

KeirKieran

Yeah, it looks like something is amiss in your geometry. Can you grab a screen shot with your wireframe turned on?

Elodin

I tried moving the vertices,

Tried changing it to subdivs and back.

Tried unlocking normals

Nothing works so far

Here is the screenshot

KeirKieran

Try this: select all the vertices, then merge the vertices to a distance of 0.0001. Watch your verts count to see if the number changes (will tell you if you had any sneaky ones hiding). If there were, your normals may look worse at this point. Don't worry.

Pop back up to object level, and under normals use "set to face" before applying soften edge again. Set to face has fixed a lot of weird normal problems for me over the years.

Bartalon

Looks like your problem might be due to that whole area being soft-edged. If you have a 90 degree corner between two polygon surfaces, you should really consider hardening that edge. It'll solve a lot of shading issues.

Stromberg90

Alec already mentioned what the problem is, thin triangles.

Try and delete the edges and cut them like I show here.


Bartalon is also right about adding hard edges, which will help other parts looking flat.

Elodin

What I did in the end is rotate all the vertices, which looked bad.

They had weird angles. So I rotated them 90 degrees forward, all of them. Seems to do the trick.

Butthair

That fixes it.

The problem was in smoothing groups and and how Maya (or Max) handles it when using smooth normals or set normal angle tool. Yes, thin triangles are causing the dark lines, but removing them does not address the shading issue.

Using the Edit Normals Tool and setting all the normals to the same value helps correct the shading problem.

Btw, that model may not require it being a single mesh, I think you could break parts off from each other, removing the many loops created around the circular parts and arch.

Elodin

It kind of have to be one piece, it's a door

But thanks for the advice

AdvisableRobin

There is no reason is has to be a single mesh, floating and intersecting geometry is a very common method of modeling lowpoly objects.

The topology could also be changed around like Stromberg said.