Vertex Normal Splits
polycounter lvl 11
First, check out my example of what I'm talking about with "Vertex Normal Splits", in case I'm calling this the wrong thing:
Sphere #1 on the left was converted to a poly, and detached to elements on the top/bottom hemispheres. Sphere #2 has Edit Normals thrown on to show the vertex normals being split along their edges. Sphere #3 has Edit Normals as well, and had it's normals Averaged with a threshold.
This seems to be the default behavior in Max. Using Edit Normals allows me to fix this in a lot of cases, and while a pain, it works.... unless I have smoothing groups:
Same issue here; Sidewalk #1 is broken into two pieces, Sidewalk #2 shows the normals, Sidewalk #3 is Averaged with a threshold. The obvious problem is that Averaging destroys the existing Smoothing groups. This seems like a really counter intuitive default behavior, and I can't seem to avoid it. The only thing I can do is break the smoothing groups into pieces, offset their position, average, then undo the offsets. This is a huge amount of work for what should really just be "detach, preserve normals".
Am I doing something the hard way? Did someone write a tool or script to fix this that I don't know of? Or is this something that's just dumb in Max, and Maya or whatever handles this better? I'm making it work for small models, but I'm trying to sort this out for a 25 mile road scene, and it's literally impossible to do this piece by piece. What am I doing wrong?
Sphere #1 on the left was converted to a poly, and detached to elements on the top/bottom hemispheres. Sphere #2 has Edit Normals thrown on to show the vertex normals being split along their edges. Sphere #3 has Edit Normals as well, and had it's normals Averaged with a threshold.
This seems to be the default behavior in Max. Using Edit Normals allows me to fix this in a lot of cases, and while a pain, it works.... unless I have smoothing groups:
Same issue here; Sidewalk #1 is broken into two pieces, Sidewalk #2 shows the normals, Sidewalk #3 is Averaged with a threshold. The obvious problem is that Averaging destroys the existing Smoothing groups. This seems like a really counter intuitive default behavior, and I can't seem to avoid it. The only thing I can do is break the smoothing groups into pieces, offset their position, average, then undo the offsets. This is a huge amount of work for what should really just be "detach, preserve normals".
Am I doing something the hard way? Did someone write a tool or script to fix this that I don't know of? Or is this something that's just dumb in Max, and Maya or whatever handles this better? I'm making it work for small models, but I'm trying to sort this out for a 25 mile road scene, and it's literally impossible to do this piece by piece. What am I doing wrong?
Replies
And yeah, +1 to the request, so far I had to edit manually my weights here and there, would like to know a streamlined process too.
EDIT: Oops, didn't see the second post, hehe...
Explicit normals (green) override the smoothing groups. You have to hit reset so they go back to a "standard" state (blue)
Imo the weakness of max (here), is, when using the detach function, explicit normals should be preserved. What you can do is :
On your complete object, make all your normals explicit. Collapse.
Duplicate the object, delete one part on one object.
Delete the other part on the other object.
Bit tedious i agree though probably scriptable.
OR select both meshes and average normals.
OR by transfer attributes u can also hold the normals of mesh Y constrained to the one in X
MAX always had a hard time with vertex normals.
-Normals get lost upon export: http://forums.cgsociety.org/showthread.php?t=398692
-Possible script: http://forums.cgsociety.org/showthread.php?t=875136
-Old solution of manual edit: http://forums.cgsociety.org/showthread.php?t=619291
-In-Depth discussion: http://forums.cgsociety.org/showthread.php?t=62780
@Ace - I wrote a script to handle this. It's not foolproof, but it's working for me... you have to be in sub-object mode (just like if you were to detach), and it seems to only work if your mesh is collapsed. But feel free to edit it as you like! Thanks again!
Edit Mesh, Editable Mesh, and Editable Poly all respect Edit Normals. Edit Poly, specifically, seems to reset them. I'm splitting my mesh as part of my export process, so this shouldn't matter too much. As a rule, I tend to avoid Edit Poly anyways... it has slightly different behavior from Editable Poly, and tends to freak me out.
Ace - Is that script (or doing it manually) not working for you?
Ah, OK, that's makes sense then, I was using Edit Poly all the time. Oops :poly136:
Cheers, it works now.
A couple days back I was seriously doing the exact same shit as you with a curb, trying to edit normals, converting to edit poly (losing my normals in the process, thanks for the "Editable Tip" but I wish I wouldn't have to collapse my stack.) and trying to do splits while preserving normals. I had sooo many of the same problems as you and google was no help until I discover this thread today where you are practically reliving my life. WTF.
I didn't bother to post either since I was trying to work it out on my own with the manual.
must be a sign. :poly141::poly142:
The reason why I was doing this is because in BF3 some of the buildings corner edges have these bent normals but no chamfer and I was wondering how they do that with their tiling texture, trying to recreate the effect.