Conform normals maya 2008 almost never works?

malcolm · Jul 2009

Anyone else able to figure out how to get the conform normals tool to work in maya 2008? It seems to work fine when I use it on simple test objects but one or our artists has a model where running the tool does nothing. Any help, or after market scripts?

pior · Jul 2009

Hi M,
You need to look at (and have a TA look at it too) : unlock normals. Some maya operations perform a lock for some reason, and some dont. It would mess up anything normal related hence I would say, have a TA force-unlock thiscrap at all time or something.

To be sure you have a clean mesh for a normal transfer operation :

normals > hard
normals > set to faces
normals > unlock normals

rinse and repeat ...

MoP · Jul 2009

Yeah, the best thing is that Unlock Normals doesn't always unlock the normals properly ... so you have to do a couple of other normal actions (soft/hard edge etc), delete the history, then unlock and they should be properly unlocked.
This has happened to me several times, and I still haven't been able to pin down exactly what it is that causes this bug.

malcolm · Jul 2009

Hey guys, I think we're talking about 2 different things here. I have a model where some of the normals are facing inwards, ie the artist mirrored his model and froze the transform on it before combining it so half the model's normals are facing the wrong way. According to the maya help conform normals is supposed to unify the direction of all the normals using the majority of the normals as a base. Would be an amazing tool if it worked. I've tried all the usually crap, freeze transform, unlock normals, soften, harden, edit normals. It's weird works find a couple combine cubes but does not work on a slightly more complicated mesh?

Mop as far as the normals getting locked there seems to be many ways to do this but if you ever use average normals I believe that locks the normals on your whole mesh, kind of lame. Unlocking and you lose your averaged normals.

ivars · Jul 2009

You probably already know this but the conform only works within the same shell/element. So it might be that it's separate shells in the mesh?

Whargoul · Jul 2009

Yeah, it only works on a per-shell basis. It starts with one normal, and propagates it across the surface. If you object is one shell, then you probably have non-manifold geo somewhere that is stopping the propagation.

pior · Jul 2009

Oh sorry I thought you meant a transfer attributes thing (I was reading "conform" as in "make one object normals behaving like another's")

Best luck on this, that kind of stuff keeps being a pain here too

malcolm · Jul 2009

Crappy, I wonder if a tool can be written to do this magic.

Ikuru · Nov 2012

I had this issue with a highpoly mesh, had to mark certain faces, grow selection and reverse normals. Tedious process. The conform did not work...
Found this too,
http://usa.autodesk.com/adsk/servlet/ps/dl/item?siteID=123112&id=12567811&linkID=9242258

Am wondering if I could have fixed this in zbrush?
I guess turning of double sided in zbrush while working is a start

Sorry for bumping this old thread, but I think this is still a problem with reversing all the normals to point in one direction, should that really be that hard?

Conform normals maya 2008 almost never works?

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