Project vertex normals from one mesh to another

JordanW

Does anyone know how to bend low poly normals to match another object? This would be used for something like a bunch of leaf planes then bending their normals to a rough shape of the cluster of leaves. Max has the edit normals modifier but that's crazy tedious to edit each normal's direction, I'm looking for some sort or plugin, or a feature of max I'm overlooking.

Tom Ellis

Normal thief might be what you're after? It's pretty slow but works well.

http://www.scriptspot.com/3ds-max/scripts/normal-thief

JordanW

thanks I think this is what i'm looking for, although i'm worried it has trouble with a few hundred verts and my mesh i'm wanting to try it on is in the tens of thousands

Tom Ellis

Yeah it works a lot better on lower vert counts. From my experience, it can work on much more complex meshes but is very very slow and gets a bit unstable. Only way to find out is give it a shot I guess.

MoP

Maya can do this with Transfer Attributes, if you have a copy available (at work?) ?

Ben Apuna

I believe there's an updated version of the normal thief script on the wiki, it should be faster than the original.

Eric Chadwick originally posted about it in the Tree making fast technique? thread.

JordanW

I grabbed the updated one and it worked great!

I saw that as well MoP! I have access to Maya at work but my workflow had already gotten so complex without this step I'd feel guilty saying "now export to maya, do some shit to the normals and reimport into max"