Weighted vertex normals and 3ds max workflow.

Geekson

Hey guys! I'm looking for the ways to improve my workflow with weighted vertex normals in 3ds max. 
Here is a quick test I made to visualize what I'm struggling with now. 
I'm trying to use the first one as often as possible, but since i have to manually select faces to average normals from them, it can be tricky on complex meshes. I made some simple scripts to assign Material ID on chamfered faces, so i'm basically making selection groups, to quickly select faces, invert, and use GetVertexNormalsFromFace script to get nice shading. And the main problem that i always missing those mat IDs when i'm attaching one mesh to another, or apply the different material, or because of any other reason. Sometimes i just have no time to select all needed faces again, so I use IFWN, but shading is far from perfect after that. 
So how can I avoid missing my selection groups in 3ds max? Mat IDs don't seem to be reliable, and i don't know what i can use instead of them. I heard something about face flags but didn't find anything useful.  And how do you basically work in this pipeline? 

monster

IFWN (paid version) has a co-planar face weighted option, it would help in some of these cases, but the extruded area at the top would still be a little off.

I hate to throw yet another tool at you. This is a pretty easy solution though, I added a snap tolerance to my tool. So if the VertNormal (after FWN) and the FaceNormal are close, it just uses the FaceNormal.

You can download the tool from this page:
http://portfolio.juantwo.com/maxscripts.html

Geekson

monster said:

I hate to throw yet another tool at you. This is a pretty easy solution though, I added a snap tolerance to my tool. So if the VertNormal (after FWN) and the FaceNormal are close, it just uses the FaceNormal.

You can download the tool from this page:
http://portfolio.juantwo.com/maxscripts.html

Thanks a lot, it looks really promising. I bought IFWN, but it seems that I'm too dumb to adjust coplanar values right, so I had to do a lot of tweaks manually. Hope it will help me, thanks again

monster

Geekson said:

...it seems that I'm too dumb to adjust coplanar values right, so I had to do a lot of tweaks manually....

You're not too dumb. If you look at the top most extruded box, it has a coplanar quad. So you expect better results than just plain face area weighting. But the small beveled face has a coplanar face too. So ratio of the weighting didn't change because both tris (the small and the large) have a second coplanar face of the same size.