Averaging vertex normals - impossible?

[JuRrAsStOiL]

you mean, that it is seamless, but 2 pieces.
That's hard, because it depends on the smoothing
groups.

Perhaps someone else can help.

[LFShade]

Make a sphere. Select the top half of the faces and assign material ID 2, and make sure the bottom half has an ID of 1. Clone this sphere, apply a scale of -1 on the Z-axis, and then reset its scale. Create a multi/subobject material with 2 sub-materials, and make the second material completely transparent (0 transparency, 0 specular level, 0 glossiness). Make the first material 2-sided. Assign the material to the spheres.

Now when you render, the result looks like a single, completely smooth sphere. But if you separate the two spheres and render, you can see that they appear to be separate, hollow hemispheres.

[polygone]

Wow! There's a work around for ya :)

I don't know how you came to that solution, but it is a way to make it work. I'm surprised this is the only way to get this effect.

[LFShade]

It may not be the only way, but it was all I could think of offhand. I looked into doing something through scripting, but I couldn't find any way to access/change vertex normal data. Oh well;)

[Chris Thomas]

Anoylingly you can edit normal data in Max5, however the press release states that this only becomes visible when used in a realtime game engine. They need to change this to work in all cases as it would be a cool feature. At the momment the problem with the transparent face trick is that the transparent area will still cast shadows... Maybe poly object could be enhanced to have not only hide but to make poly's non renderable, then you could do this trick at the model and not shader level. Maybe a wish list item :)

Chris Thomas

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