Black vertex normals

Elodin

Hi all,

I'm getting this weird bug every time I unwrap model in Zbrush. I tried to fix normals, set to face, etc. But set to face returns them to hard edge and when I got back to soft edge, I get the bug again. Anybody knows how to fix this? Even baking normals doesn't properly work with this.

Joost

I'm not very familiar with Maya, but try resetting the vertex normals?

Eric Chadwick

Do you mean the horizontal box in the back? That's just the way vertex normals work. If you smooth all the edges of a box, you'll get large gradients across the faces. If you bevel the edge and edit the normals, you can reduce or eliminate those gradients.

A short explanation about custom vertex normals (tutorial)

m4dcow

Eric Chadwick wrote: »

Do you mean the horizontal box in the back? That's just the way vertex normals work. If you smooth all the edges of a box, you'll get large gradients across the faces. If you bevel the edge and edit the normals, you can reduce or eliminate those gradients.

A short explanation about custom vertex normals (tutorial)

Maybe he means the thing attached to the cylinder in the front.

In the import export process, some vertex normal may have become locked. Unlock normal and see if that helps.

Elodin

Actually I mean both of them. Same looking sharp gradient.

From gray to black straight away.

Unlocking normals didn't help.

Bartalon

Looks like you have those meshes all on a single smoothing group. Select the edges that you would consider a "corner" and harden the edges (Normals > Harden Edge, or Mesh Display > Harden Edge depending on your version of Maya). The shading should go away. You get black like that because your model is so low poly that the few vertex normals you have are trying to bend lighting information all the way around a 90 degree edge which isn't really possible.

m4dcow

Elodin wrote: »

Actually I mean both of them. Same looking sharp gradient.

From gray to black straight away.

Unlocking normals didn't help.

Well the horizontal box in the back looks how it should if you have just smoothed the whole thing and there not being extra geometry to help the shading.

The vertical boxes look how face weighted vertex normal should look if you have bevels on the edges.

The other bit I mentioned is the one that looks off to me but without seeing the geometry of these things its hard to tell.

Elodin

Adding more edge loops helped a little bit. Thanks Eric!

Thane-

Are you sure thats not the 3DS max viewport, because that looks very VERY familiar.