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…
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.
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.
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…