Question about Face Weighted Normals in Maya

riceborn1

Hello, I recently learned about face weighted normals and just wanted to get some clarification on how they are applied in Maya.

My current understanding is that Maya versions after 2012 apply face weighted normals by default on everything. So all I would need to do is add bevels and soften the edges. Is this correct or is there something I am missing?

poopipe

that depends whether it looks how you want it to look. 

face-weighted normals isn't some defined method of building things - it just means that vertex normal direction is affected by the relative size (area) of the faces it's attached to and generally means you get nicer shading without manual intervention.

gnoop

Face weighted normals  is not a panacea . They helped mostly on boxy shaped things  with geometry bevels.  Their main purpose is transferring shading gradients from big flat quads to smaller and thin bevel ones.    Not working that good on intersecting cylinders for example.    If your next LOD is without those bevels  already  it may give you a shading pop up on that LOD switch or you need a separate normal map for that LOD.      

 So weighted normals  do make sense if  your geometry really need beveled edges   that would stay long ahead  through few LOD levels . 

All this are irrelevant  if you use Unreal5 Nanite rendering   probably .

CheeseOnToast

Maya's default face weighting is not the same as some of the face-weighted pipelines you may have read about. It does some weighting, but not enough to turn a bevelled cube into a nice looking object, for example. Unless things have changed in the latest release, it's not going to be what you're looking for.