fixing vertex normals quickly between seperate objects in maya.

malcolm

Hey so I have a lot of terrain that is cut up into pieces for light mapping, I need the normals between pieces to be shared to bake out correctly. ie I need to have the border edge normals have the same value between the overlapping verts. The best way I've found so far is to use the vertex normal edit tool and just shift the gizmo one pixel. Anyone got a script that fixes this problem or a better workflow?

malcolm

I've moved on to just selecting the verts and having a button for set vertex normal to y value 1.0 seems to work for what I'm doing.

SHEPEIRO

you can also hot key the average normal function, and stitch all the norls like that but it costs time.

a solution could be (not tried it) duplicate entire terrain combine and fix normals then use the transfer attributes by proximity function (mesh menu in transfer attributes) to transfer the correct normals across to the split mesh

malcolm

Ha, yeah I just noticed the average normal tool, I'm a handy tard thanks SHEPEIRO. You just need to freeze the transform of the models then select the offending overlapping verts and average normals.

SHEPEIRO

the second solution i gave would give a more accurate effect and if you can set up your scene so that the complete mesh isnt exported it would be easy to refix things if and when you need to do it