[Maya/Free] Face-Weighted Vertex Normals Tool

Fansub

Hey guys ! I've been thoroughly working on AMT's next update for almost half a year now, and decided to share with you one of the tools that will be included in it's next update for free !

DOWNLOAD LINK

AMT Normal Tools Lite is a custom vertex normal editing tool that allows you to automatically (or manually) set the vertex normals of a given face to be perpendicular to it's face normal.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MmvpnqDKp-o

This tool is provided for free, so feel free to share it with your friends and co-workers !

It works on Maya 2016,2016LT,2016.5,2017 and 2017LT. Windows Only.

Unlike AMT's take on this solution, this tool requires the history of a bevel in order to work. The tool either uses a pre-existing bevel node in your history as a reference or creates a new bevel for you to  be able to control it.
Once the tool does it's magic, you can simply start dragging the middle mouse button left or right in order to adjust the bevel width of your mesh, which is pretty neat !

AMT's next update is (again, i know) reported unfortunately, too much work and time mis-management  plus health issues have led to this, but i'm starting to adapt to it and slowly but surely pouring out the last bits of work on it

Again, really sorry for all the delays, hope this one lets you wait until then ^^'

Sajeet

Thank you for all your hard work m8! Much appreciated, awesome update as well

Makkon

I'm going to use the ever-loving crap out of this tool! It's the direction modeling is going I think, and it's a must-have. I would have paid good money just for this tool, it was very kind of you to give it out for free! Glad you're packaging it with AMT tools too.

Niknesh

Awesome work man, works perfect.
Althought, I guess well have to be extra careful not to delete history too often, because of the bevel node.

fisherking

Hey man, 

Any plans to make this work with hard edges?  It would be very nice if could support this common scenario that is often encountered in production.

Thanks! 

Fansub

If you have a bevel node in your history it won't it will just use that instead, but if you don't have any bevel then it'll make one.

bitinn

I would really love to get this tool on Mac, is it a lot of trouble (require codebase restructure), or is it a lack of Mac hardware or other compiling issues?

Fansub

I'd say both, i haven't tried the tool on MAC and you'll probably meet some code to be swapped in order to make it work on MAC.

Cordell Felix

This is super cool! I didn't know it was for auto-beveling and weighting only. It would be nice if you had a solo button for weighted (average) normals to average normals on meshes with existing bevels and cleared history. I normally apply weighted normals once my model is done.

bitinn

Hi @Fansub

I had some free time today and tested the script on Mac, it does seem to work, with a few exception such as I can't get the help message to display.

I find you are defining proc you aren't using? I assume it's because you don't have time to clean up for this release. So I formatted the mel script for better readability: https://gist.github.com/bitinn/6de928fbfb4f8fb8839412fbfdd126f6

EDIT: added a zip file for people to test it out.

Fansub

Hey David, thanks for your help on this ! does it work just like the Windows version, with the exception of not showing messages ?

If that's the case then it shouldn't be a big issue, especially given that the tool is free. I'm not at home currently, but i'll try to test it with a MAC user or two, then proceed to put it up on the gumroad if you don't mind. I'm sure it would help a lot of MAC users, and will give credit  where it's due, too

Thanks !

bitinn

Fansub said:

Hey David, thanks for your help on this ! does it work just like the Windows version, with the exception of not showing messages ?

If that's the case then it shouldn't be a big issue, especially given that the tool is free. I'm not at home currently, but i'll try to test it with a MAC user or two, then proceed to put it up on the gumroad if you don't mind. I'm sure it would help a lot of MAC users, and will give credit  where it's due, too

Thanks !

No problem, glad to help.

I haven't tried it on a Windows yet, but it seem to work well, I tested each feature as well as middle button to change bevel size.

A few comments:

- I think most MEL scripting are cross-platform, with a few exceptions, such as path.

- I don't think bevel control using middle button is precise enough for my taste, I tried to toggle a in-view editor for bevel control but haven't figure out how using inViewEditor command.

- If it's possible, I would like to detect bevel offset type as well (I use absolute + world space bevel sometimes). AMT assumes fractional offset, which is fine by me, but worth notifying users.

g2mXagent

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first_emperor

Hi Fansub, I have been using your tools in general a lot now, mostly parts of them, but they make life a lot easier with better quality results.
I tried this tool as well a couple of times now, but not being able to delete history is kind of a blocker, since that is part of my workflow. History just messes up way to much in my workflow and with a lot of back and forth I delete history countless times.

Do you see any way to get this to work without history? Or a workaround for it at least?

Thanks for your great work so far and I'm hoping for updates on this soon

littleclaude

Hi, I am late to the party but I just wanted to say thanks for this tool.

jStins

Thanks @Fansub for the tool. I've been using it from time to time and it's been great for my purposes. I do have a question / request if you have time...

I'm working on an object export script and would love to apply FWN as part of that. I tried cannibalizing / working through some of the mel in your tool, but am yet to get any results. I'm wondering if there's a snip of mel that could apply FWN with hard coded bevel values without needing to bring up the FWN UI? 

Maybe @bitinn has an idea as well? 

Thanks again and apologies for my primitive mel knowledge. I understand if this is too big an ask, but thought I'd throw it out there. 

jStins

Today I learned that you can call procedures from other mel scripts to do stuff. (In this case the FWVNT proc suits my purposes.) 

Glacierfox

Great tool and I've given it a go but I'm slightly confused. How do I apply face weighted normals without adding a bevel? How am I supposed to create a highly complex model and still have a functional bevel modifier to work from? I commonly have to delete history hundreds of times during the model making process. What if the vertices I want to face-weight, arent even conventional bevels?

3dcaster

Hey. I love the tool. Thanks for that but recently I got the bug. could you please help me with this one?
I can not start the UI for the ADM tool because of the error below:
// Error: line 50: Number of rows must be greater than 0

It is extremely frustrating especially because I use the tool all the time and I had to create buttons for individual functions...
I would be much appreciated for help

C86G

How can I weight normals on an already bevelled mesh?

Fansub

Hey all! I haven't touched MEL scripting or this tool in years, but we're about to start beta-testing our software GraphN and there's a node for face weighted vertex normals that works on already beveled meshes   obviously it's all in Maya, and much better than the FWVN tool I shared here.

We'll start the beta pretty soon, and you can subscribe to it right here: polygonflow.io

Oniram

Ive been looking for this tool for so long! haha and only just now found it. Trying to deal with FWN manually was such a pain. Excited to see this as a part of GraphN and cant wait to try it out!

xroo

Hello. I downloaded this tools today and tested it on some quick meshes. It's not working as showed on video nor 2020, 2018 or 2016 version of Maya. I don't realy understand why it isn't working in my case. Maybe I need to set up something special?

And it seems like polyNormalPerVertex node makes normals worse than without it. I don't realy know how it must work... Maybe someone knows how to fix this problem?

xroo

VN feature in ADN Modeler Tools works better and I just use ADN Hard Edges selection tool, bevel it, select the flat surfaces with Angle Selection Constraint and use ADN Vertex Normal feature.