Perfect fitting modular assets with Editing Normals

Davision3D

I'm kinda stuck getting a decent workflow for making my modular assets. The problem being how to edit the normals so the shading of the perfect fitting pieces will also be seamless.

I'm working in Max, the main drawbacks: I can not copy paste normals from one object to another, I can only copy 1 vert normal at a time, all kinds of modifiers delete the edited normals. Normal Thief plugins can only steal from a single object (I have various normal stealing plugins here). Combining objects deletes edited normals. I can not define normal rotations like 1.0.0, everything I input is relative to the current normal direction.




Here is where I'm at:
I got the main wall pieces easily setup by welding a 3x3 wall and stealing the normals from that. Now for the curve I had to do the same but with another 3x3 wall rotated and merged into the first  3x3 object then normals stolen from that. The non side edges verts then reverted. Problem upper edges and lower edges have shading seams. So it also needs 1x3 curves merged and then normals stealing from that. Problem the corner verts don't mach anymore to the flat wall pieces. Solution: rotate corner normals by hand. All in all a really bad workflow.


Just so you can see the shading seams of the inner corner wall piece without attempting anything.

Any ideas for a decent workflow? Or maybe there is a plugin somewhere that helps here?

Obscura

Here are some workarounds:
http://polycount.com/discussion/164020/3dsmax-detaching-keeping-normals

Davision3D

Obscura said:

Here are some workarounds:
http://polycount.com/discussion/164020/3dsmax-detaching-keeping-normals

The bigger problem is attaching objects without loosing normals, In that case that trick does not work.
The normal stitcher does not help either because the normals of the seams needs to be the same for lots of different pieces and not just 2 split and the average normals of that.

Mant1k0re

Might not be what you want to hear, but if it was me I would just tailor my assets to hide the seams. In case of a wall I would use a pillar or a beam.

SnowInChina

blender has a modifier where you can copy normals from another object
so you would take both parts, connect them and copy the normals to the seperate parts.
if you want i can make a small tut for you how to set it up

edit:
also, i knoiw maya has an option to adjust normals, not sure how its named, but basicly you could select two vertices and smooth the normals on them to match one another

Axi5

In Max you can put an Edit Normals modifier on both objects, then select all of the normals you want to match and click unify, or average. Something like that, pretty easy actually.

Davision3D

Mant1k0re said:

Might not be what you want to hear, but if it was me I would just tailor my assets to hide the seams. In case of a wall I would use a pillar or a beam.

Yea, not the point here. It would also increase the polycount by a lot. This are pretty small pieces so I would need tons of extra polys to hide the seams.

SnowInChina said:

blender has a modifier where you can copy normals from another object
so you would take both parts, connect them and copy the normals to the seperate parts.
if you want i can make a small tut for you how to set it up

edit:
also, i knoiw maya has an option to adjust normals, not sure how its named, but basicly you could select two vertices and smooth the normals on them to match one another

That sounds great. Like If i have main tiling wall I could just take the normals of it edges and copy paste them to any other piece and their edges. But I have to use Blender, which is a big minus on its own. For why that Maya solution does not work see below.

Axi5 said:

In Max you can put an Edit Normals modifier on both objects, then select all of the normals you want to match and click unify, or average. Something like that, pretty easy actually.

That is nice to know but does not help here, it is then basically doing the same as the normal sticher plugin. Averaging the normals between 2 objects does not help because if I average the normals between inner curve and regular wall, the normals of the regular will not fit anymore to the outer curve nor itself.

Axi5

Okay then do the same thing but use the target function inside of the Edit Normals modifier instead?

You can specify a source normal and a target normal that will fit to it. It's basically interactive copy and paste but it's done per normal.

https://knowledge.autodesk.com/support/3ds-max/learn-explore/caas/CloudHelp/cloudhelp/2015/ENU/3DSMax/files/GUID-82722323-100B-4711-A01D-8A87EB53DD96-htm.html

Davision3D

Axi5 said:

Okay then do the same thing but use the target function inside of the Edit Normals modifier instead?

You can specify a source normal and a target normal that will fit to it. It's basically interactive copy and paste but it's done per normal.

https://knowledge.autodesk.com/support/3ds-max/learn-explore/caas/CloudHelp/cloudhelp/2015/ENU/3DSMax/files/GUID-82722323-100B-4711-A01D-8A87EB53DD96-htm.html

Yes, got it to work! When I have the Edit Normal modifier applied to multiple objects I can just use use copy paste on each vert and that way can get the normals from one object to the other.

Eric Chadwick

What I did to solve this was to instance all my pieces, and snap them all together in the same location. Then add an Edit Normals and average them. Worked pretty well, and quick.