Maya Transfer Attributes (for Vertex Normal) Giving Undesirable results -- Help!

ClockworkBeetle

Hi guys, 

I've done an extensive google search but can't anything to help with my problem, hopefully the smart people here can help.

I have a mesh with some hair cards, and I'd like to get the normals from the body to be projected onto the hair cards, much like this youtube video shows:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p4ziQFF2ZcY

But when I do the same operation, I get results like this, no matter what I try.  Always the normals face the same way, always not out in the direction I would expect.



Of course I've tried deleting history and freezing transformations on both, I'm at a loss how to make this work.

Any ideas would be very much appreciated.

throttlekitty

Reverse the normals on your hair cards, then set normals to face to reset them just to fully reset them. Then try transfer attributes again. This is because the face normal can point one way while the vertex normal can point the other way.

carlobarley

Yo,  I've recently come to this problem and thought it may help someone along the way, The way I fixed this was to export the entire mesh as an obj, import the mesh into zbrush (it apparently cleans, destroys normals whatevers) then bring it back to maya, was able to get a clean transfer.

Ghogiel

^You should just be able to skip the zbrush step and export without normals with the obj. I'd assume that should work basically the same, as normals would be recalculated on reimport since the obj won't be storing them.

It should just import back smooth shaded regardless of whatever you did with the normals before export to obj (effectively reseting them).