Flipped normals

[paintedthorn]

wasnt sure if this was a modeling question so i put it in here as well as in animation section: i have a poly character--if he turns 90 degrees or past such as 180...he renders black. if i set normals at that point he is ok--but in his animation i cant set normals every time he turns...ive tried locking the normals and it doesnt work....The Display > Normals shows it as always being outward even when the character turns black -which is wierd. Any suggestions on how to rotate characters past 90 degrees and have it render ok?

[gmask]

Are you having this problem in the software renderer , the hardware renderer or in the OpenGL GUI? If it's in the OpenGL I would not be concerned about it as it is not very accurate.

[paintedthorn]

thanks-the character turns black in the open gl within maya as well as when i physically render it. i discoverd if i poly -smooth the character he is ok--which i find odd.

[campbell]

jealously regarding paintedthorn's physical renderer from the corner.

[leach]

um, sounds like you need to check your lights. how many lights have you placed in the scene and where are they pointing? have you set it to use these lights instead of the default lighting?

leach

[warpcat]

I run across this often. It usually stems when bringing geo into Maya from other software packages. I don't know what causes it, it's quite a pain, but the fix is easy. First, what is happening: It appears that the order of rendering is off on the surfuace... normally, the object is deformed, then lit, but in this case it is lit, then deformed, taking the shadows with it. Anyways, to fix, do a polyReduce on the surface, set to 0%. The polyReduce will totally "reset" your normals (above and beyond other Maya functions from what I can tell), but since it's set to 0%, won't actually reduce your model. Polyreduce dosen't like non-manifold geo though, so somtimes you need to run a polygon cleanup on it first.