Can 3ds max morpher change normals?

stickadtroja

i can only get it to change the geometry, to move around the verticies, but i want to transfer the normal directions and angles of the morph target to the morph object. is that possible?

EDIT: btw i dont mean blending between normal maps. just transfer the vertex normal angles.

monster

Sorry man, it's not possible with the Morpher modifier, and the edit normals modifier doesn't seem to be keyable.

Is this for a game project? I don't know of any engines that will support animated normals.

stickadtroja

hmm thats too bad. yes it is for a game. when you morph the face of a character, it can be really useful to have control over the normals.
if someone finds a way, im all ears.

stickadtroja

i have looked into my issue some more, and i run into something weird.

i have a character mesh, that i want to deform using the morpher. what i notice is though, that the morpher doesnt change the normals. i mean, for example if i make a morph target with a 90 degree rotated head, when i pull the morph slider, the vertecies move, but the head becomes all dark, like the normals are arent rotated to match the vertecies. its like you what happens if you apply the edit normals modifier, selects all of the normals, and rotate them 90 degrees.

so it seems the morph target only changes the vertecies, but preserves the normals in their absolute world positions.
the thing is, this doesnt happen always. if i make a new box for example, this doesnt happen. the box gets rotated finely with the morpher. normals act like they should.

so then i tried attaching the character mesh to the box, but then it acts like it did with just the character mesh. then i delete the character mesh, xform the box and edit normals just to check, but it STILL morphs without changing the normals.

any ideas how to solve this? are the normals secrectly locked eventhough they show up fine in the edit normals modifier? can i unlock them somehow?

EDIT: alright, i can workaround it if i add a edit normal modifier on top of the morpher. feels a bit wierd though, so any suggestions are welcome

stickadtroja

i nailed down my problem now i think. if i make a box, export it as obj, and import it into my scene, the normals are green if i apply the edit normals modifier. even if i reset them, so they are blue, the morpher wont care about that. or a animation with skin and biped for that matter. they still treat it like the normals are explicit or locked. Why is this? arent they really "resetted"? is there some otherway to do that?

EDIT: btw this is including reset xform mutliple times

monster

Objects with Explicit Normals tend to exhibit that behavior. To fix I usually put a Turn to Poly mod under the Morpher. But that only really fixes it in Max. You should test in your game engine to see if normals are updated in realtime.

Nhdeitmers

This behaviour must have been introduced as a "fix" to something else? I just revisited a heavy morphing project done in 3DS Max 2009. At the time I was doing all sorts of linear and progressive morphs between human models at different ages. Not an issue. Now opening the meshes in 2022 gives me this weird behaviour, where the morphing model will retain it's normals (unless you try the ebove mentioned fixes)

Eric Chadwick

This sounds like a good candidate for an official bug report. 

https://www.autodesk.com/company/contact-us/product-feedback