Flipped Faces means UVs not recognized - Beginner Blender stuff

[Nacy Nightfire]

I've been trying out the new developers (development?) viewer and I'm liking it!  But I ran into a problem I struggled with a bit that I thought I'd share.  This may not be viewer specific, in fact, it may be the way it's supposed to work and I just hadn't run into this before by chance.

I struggled with my mesh refusing to accept my texture. It turned the model completely black which was a "head scratcher" because I made UV's and baked a texture to them.  (I later realized it was black because most of my texture's background was black and the whole thing was essentially blurred together having no UV's to take guidance from.)

It turned out I had a few very small flipped normals that I didnt' notice.  Even when I began to think that the normals  wasn't my problem because I thought  I got them all, I STILL found yet another.  Finally I got it all together.  Note  "CTL N"  did NOT realign the normals properly.  When using extrude alot I think Blender gets confused. All these small faces had to be flipped individually.

I hope this helps someone else struggling with the same problem.  Find those little guys and flip them!  Don't rely on "CTL N" to do the job.

[Chosen Few]

Just as an FYI, it's not uncommon in any 3D modeling program for extrusions to exhibit unexpected behavior, if you do a whole lot of them without being mindful of normals, UV's, and construction history.  It's always a good idea, every time you extrude, to check the normals, and fix the UV's on the new surfaces. Same goes for booleans, extractions, appends, reductions, etc.  Any action that adds geometry, or otherwise fundamentally alter the existing topology, can potentially bork the normals and/or the UV's.

Also, in programs that track construction history for objects, delete the history often, to avoid potential conflicts.  Only keep the history on an object for as long as you actually need it.  It's best to delete history before and after any actions that will break the existing topology, since the current history will no longer be directly applicable to the new structure.

[Nacy Nightfire]

Thanks Chosen Few, that's going in my mesh notes!  Good stuff