Tutorial - the virtues of normal editing.

[Kyrah Abattoir]

@Ana Stubbs Can we see the new version? Curious.

[Ana Stubbs]

On 9/30/2018 at 2:36 AM, Kyrah Abattoir said:

@Ana Stubbs Can we see the new version? Curious.

I'm not entirely sure i'm happy with the result I got, but at least I understand the technique now

[Kyrah Abattoir]

That's looking pretty flawless in this picture.

[Love Zhaoying]

On 9/21/2018 at 4:42 PM, ChinRey said:

No, I wasn't, I was simply wrong.

 

We should form a “People who Admit When They’re Wrong” Club.

[Ana Stubbs]

4 hours ago, Kyrah Abattoir said:

That's looking pretty flawless in this picture.

I think I'd become so used to seeing the horizontal line of the sticky-out bit (technical vocab) between the bevels that it now looks odd for it not to be there. A bit like the way that the word "mesh" begins to lose all meaning when I read too much of this forum at once.

Of course, it's not going to make much difference either way unless someone walks up and stares intently at it.

[arton Rotaru]

8 hours ago, Ana Stubbs said:

Of course, it's not going to make much difference either way unless someone walks up and stares intently at it.

 "Face Weighted Normals" (that is, the vertex normals are more perpendicular to the faces with the larger areas) come in handy when using a Highpoly to Lowpoly normals map baking workflow. This way you can remove/reduce the gradience in the normals map on the large surfaces, which helps greatly to keep the shading intact on lower levels of detail of the model as well.

FWN FTW
(that is, Face Weighted Normals For The Win )

Edited October 8, 2018 by arton Rotaru

[Holey Socke]

Years ago, to achieve a smooth look you subdivided if you didn't know any better. Then came playing with phong angles. I'm not sure how Blender deals with that, seems a bit complex from what I've read above. Other programs simply allow you to change the angle of vertex normals through a setting or tag and either apply it to the whole model or selected vertices/polys. If you're still having trouble getting a grasp on this CG Guerilla still have their much simplified explanation/tutorial videos on YouTube...and one specifically for this situation.

 

[Kyrah Abattoir]

That video to me looks more like plain edge splits/hard edges vs smooth which isn't what this tutorial was about.

[Ana Stubbs]

Quote

Harden Normals

When enabled, the per-vertex face normals of the bevel faces are adjusted to match the surrounding faces, and the normals of the surrounding faces are not affected. This will keep the surrounding faces flat (if they were before), with the bevel faces shading smoothly into them. For this effect to work, you need custom normals data, which requires Auto Smooth option to be enabled (see Normals).

 

If I understand this right, this new "Harden Normals" option for the bevel modifier in 2.80+ makes this process much easier, and removes the need for transfering normals from a copy of the mesh?

[Kyrah Abattoir]

On 7/1/2020 at 3:25 AM, Ana Stubbs said:

 

If I understand this right, this new "Harden Normals" option for the bevel modifier in 2.80+ makes this process much easier, and removes the need for transfering normals from a copy of the mesh?

Just had a go at it and it APPEARS to produce a simmilar result, but with 2.8 I couldn't get it to show me the corner normals properly. I don't have the time to test upload right now but so far you are right.

That being said I wouldn't say it "replaces" the method, but it is certainly a valid (and fast!) way to do it on objects that only need one bevel type.

Edited July 2, 2020 by Kyrah Abattoir