optimal mesh lighting and normals

[Napili Sands]

I bought a mesh dress model, but the lighting on it is horrible! It looks like the front is lit up by a bright spotlight, but the back is dull gray and featureless. The effect is consistent when I rez it and rotate the model. Needless to say, my carefully shadowed texture looks awful on it. Since the dress came with .dae files, I decided to play around with some upload values on aditi. I found if I generated normals by bumping the default value of 75.00 up or down one, the model looked much better, which leaves me wondering what the best way to fix this problem would be. I have access to Maya. TIA

[arton Rotaru]

Try a google search with this:  "edit vertex normals in maya".

When you edit the vertex normals in maya, don't touch the "generate normals" thingy in the SL uploader though, or your custom normals will be lost.

 

[Napili Sands]

Turns out I didn't have to mess with the vertex normals at all. I loaded the .dae into Maya 2013, selected "no lights" and saved it. It looks fine when I uploaded it to aditi.