A couple Q's about pgon normals

[Levitateme]

directly manipulate? like you want to rotate a faaces normal or soemthing?

[Electrofirma]

directly manipulate? like you want to rotate a faaces normal or soemthing?
Yup! :)

[Levitateme]

i am guessing you can of course, with MEL i think anything is possible. but why. what do you want to do that for.

[Electrofirma]

I am having difficulty getting pleasing results transitioning from hard to soft edges (Like in eyelid details) using the tools provided. It could easily be my lack of understanding of the tools, but it seems that finer control, for small areas, would be useful.

If any of you eyelid masters would care to jump in with a discussion of how you deal with hard/soft edge transitions.

Again, my problems are probably due to my newbieness...

Thanks!

[Levitateme]

so you want your eye lids to have hard normals? and as the faces go out soft? you could do that by just selecting and addinv normal soften/harden values. take a while. but why isnt the whole thing like soften/harden 90 value, for exp?

[Electrofirma]

OK, here is an illustration of the issue I asked about concerning blendshapes. Anyone have any ideas how to get around this?

[Electrofirma]

Come on... Someone can tell me why blendshape does that (nothing) to the normals.

(Attachment in previous post)

[Levitateme]

come on?
so you want your normals to do what? get soft, hard?

[Waboflex]

The blendshapes do nothing to the normals because they only work on vertex position data, they don't carry over anything like normal or UV information. The base object will always have the normals as you've set them on it, regardless of it's shape.

You probably are ways of changing normals during an animation (runtime scripting?), but I don't think it would be a good idea since you'd likely see some nasty popping on the surface (edge normals can only be hard or soft, you can't blend smoothly between them).

There isn't a manipulator or anything like that to edit normals, but you have direct (numeric) control over them through the Set Vertex Normal command (in the Normals menu). We've used this before to fake lighting effects, worked very well, but is a bit 'techy' and not very intuitive to use.

Hope it helps.

Wabo.

[Electrofirma]

so you want your normals to do what? get soft, hard?
No I simply want them to act as they should :)

Thanx for the reply Waboflex. In the case of the blendshapes, your comments got me to thinking that I was missing something obvious, and in fact I was. The 'set user normal' check box in the set normals to face option box was my problem. I had it checked, and that overrides the standard, always perpendicular normal.

your mention of the set vertex normal command led me to thinking about the 'Vertex Face' component and between the two of those it does give the full control that I felt was missing. It certainly isn't a select/rotate/scale type operation but it should give enough control to shut me up for awhile.

Thanks all, problem solved.

[wrend]

hey. bonus games has an 'interactive normal adjustment' interface, whcih is the same as the set normals, but it updates as you push the values. you could pipe a (custom?) manipulator into these values if you really wanted to get in there and rotate (turn rotations, on an invisible locator your rotating, into vector).

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